Making the Mission: Planning and Ethnicity in San Francisco 9780226290287

Citation preview

Making the Mission

H IS TORI C A L S T U D I ES OF U RBAN AME R I CA Edited by Lilia Fernández, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Becky M. Nicolaides, and Amanda I. Seligman James R. Grossman, Editor Emeritus

Also in the series: A Nation of Neighborhoods: Cities, Communities, and Democracy in the Modern American Imagination, 1940–1980 by Benjamin Looker The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s by Evan Friss World of Homeowners: American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid by Nancy H. Kwak Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis by Andrew R. Highsmith Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit by Lila Corwin Berman Blood Runs Green: The Murder That Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago by Gillian O’Brien A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850–1950 by Marta Gutman A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida by N. D. B. Connolly Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York by Cindy R. Lobel Crucibles of Black Power: Chicago’s Neighborhood Politics from the New Deal to Harold Washington by Jeffrey Helgeson The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950–1972 by Christopher Lowen Agee Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto by Camilo José Vergara Planning the Home Front: Building Bombers and Communities at Willow Run by Sarah Jo Peterson

Additional series titles follow index

Making the Mission Planning and Ethnicity in San Francisco

OCEAN HOWELL

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Ocean Howell is assistant professor of history in the Clark Honors College and the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Oregon. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-14139-8 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-29028-7 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226290287.001.0001 Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Neil Harris Endowment Fund, which honors the innovative scholarship of Neil Harris, the Preston and Sterling Morton Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago. The Fund is supported by contributions from the students, colleagues, and friends of Neil Harris. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Howell, Ocean, author. Making the Mission: planning and ethnicity in San Francisco / Ocean Howell. pages; cm. — (Historical studies of urban America) ISBN 978-0-226-14139-8 (cloth: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-29028-7 (e-book) 1. Mission District (San Francisco, Calif.)—History—20th century. 2. Urban renewal—California—San Francisco—History—20th century. 3. Community development—California—San Francisco—History— 20th century. 4. Mission District (San Francisco, Calif.)—Ethnic relations. 5. Hispanic Americans—California—San Francisco. I. Title. II. Series: Historical studies of urban America. HT177.S3H69 2015 [F869.S36 M57] 307.3′41609794610904—dc23 2015014462 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Laural

CONTENTS

ONE

/ Neighborhood Power in Twentieth-Century San Francisco / 1 PART I: NEIGHBORHOOD POWER IN THE “ W H I T E M A N ’ S T E R R I T O R Y, ” 1 9 0 6 – 2 9

T W O / Make No Big Plans: The City Beautiful Meets Improvement Clubs / 33 T H R E E / Neighborhood Capitalism: Urban Planning, Municipal Government, and the Mission Promotion Association / 58

/ The Mission and the Spatial Imagination: Discourse, Ethnicity, and Architecture / 83

FOUR

PART II: THE NEW DEAL IN THE MISSION: R E V I T A L I Z I N G C O M M U N I T Y, E R O D I N G L O C A L P O W E R

FIVE

/ A New Population, Not a New Public: Latino Diversity in San Francisco and the Mission District / 121

S I X / Economic Equality, Racial Erasure: The Spatial and Cultural Interventions of Federal Public Works Agencies / 132

/ “No-Lining” and Neighborhood Erasure: Washington, D.C., and Downtown San Francisco Come to the Mission / 148

SEVEN

P A R T I I I : P R O G R E S S F O R W H O M ? T R A N S P O R TAT I O N P L A N N I N G , U R B A N R E N E WA L , A N D M U LT I E T H N I C C O A L I T I O N B U I L D I N G , 1945–60

E I G H T / The Motoring Public and Neighborhood Erasure: The Culture and Practice of Postwar Transportation Planning / 177

NINE

/ Latino as Worker: The Changing Politics of Race in the City and the Neighborhood / 211

PA R T I V: R E T U R N TO T H E C I T Y W I T H I N A C I T Y: M U L T I E T H N I C C O A L I T I O N S A N D U R B A N R E N E W A L , 1 9 61 – 7 3

TEN

ELEVEN

/ A “Salvable Neighborhood”: Urban Renewal, Model Cities, and the Rise of a Social Planning Regime / 231

/ Who Holds Final Authority? The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and the Mission Council on Redevelopment / 258

/ The Return to the City within a City: The Mission Coalition Organization and the Devolution of Planning Power / 279

T W E LV E

Conclusion / 311 Acknowledgments / 317 Abbreviations / 321 Notes / 325 Index / 379 Plates follow page 118.

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San Francisco in the twenty-first century. Map by Blake Swanson.

Figure 1.1. April 1906 fire as seen from the northern Mission District. The dome of city hall is visible to the left of frame. Library of Congress.

ONE

Neighborhood Power in Twentieth-Century San Francisco

Early in the morning of April 18, 1906, an earthquake measuring between 7.7 and 8.3 on the Richter scale struck two miles off the coast of San Francisco, rupturing gas mains in the city and igniting a fire that raged for four days, over four square miles. The temblor shook hundreds of buildings to the ground, and the ensuing firestorm consumed almost thirty thousand structures. More than three thousand people were killed.1 The residents of San Francisco’s Mission District had a unique and terrifying view of the event. From the hill above Mission Park (today Dolores Park), they watched the fire destroy their city’s most densely built and populated neighborhoods, including downtown, North Beach, Chinatown, the Tenderloin, Nob Hill, Russian Hill, and South of Market.2 They stood in crowds in the streets of the northern Mission, and watched as the dome of city hall disappeared behind a wall of smoke. (See fig. 1.1.) On Dolores Street, they watched as the flames finally died at the doorstep of the city’s oldest building, the Misión San Francisco de Asís, the structure from which both the district and the larger city had taken their names.3 Over the following months and years, city boosters understandably recounted the drama of the crisis in much the same way that novelists and later filmmakers would: San Franciscans banded together in the wake of the disaster to support one another and to rebuild their city, leaving them more unified than they had ever been. There is certainly truth to this narrative. The historical record abounds with first-person accounts of bravery and selflessness, and there is little doubt that the shared experience of disaster and mutual assistance created a new psychological bond among San Franciscans. Yet the disaster also marked a moment when San Francisco became a profoundly divided place. The cinders had hardly cooled before a fight erupted over how the city should be rebuilt. The earthquake shook

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apart many stable political coalitions, but new ones formed almost immediately to advocate for the reconstruction plans that best served their own respective interests, interests that revolved around property, commerce, and cultural identity. In the hopes of remaking the geography of San Francisco according to a grand, unifying, neoclassical vision—articulated in Daniel Burnham’s iconic 1905 plan for the city—many banks and high-profile real estate investors had joined city hall in an attempt to centralize urban planning authority. Resistance to the plan came from conservative business interests and from neighborhood groups, Mission District groups most prominent among them. The opposition prevailed, and San Francisco was left with a power vacuum: if the city had failed to centralize planning authority in the municipal government, then who would guide the rebuilding of the city? In the Mission District, local leaders emerged to announce that, at least in their section of the city, the neighborhood itself would call the shots. The most prominent of these leaders was James Rolph Jr., a lifelong Missionite who would become the city’s longest serving mayor (1912–31) and later the governor of California (1931–34). When Rolph was later asked who had given the neighborhood groups the “authority to organize and govern the Mission during the panic days,” Rolph replied, “Nobody gave us authority. We took it.”4 Before 1906, this would not have been possible. During that period, individual neighborhood groups had only spoken with a collective voice when it came to matters like street lighting and repaving. Now they stepped onto a larger stage, exerting influence in matters of cityand even statewide importance for the first time. It would not be the last. In the twentieth century, many neighborhood-based groups in American cities would come to exert significant and sometimes decisive influence over the physical and social planning of the areas they called home. The story of how these neighborhood groups came to be—and of when and how they were able to operate effectively—holds many lessons for historians of urban America, lessons about urban planning, municipal government, ethnic and race relations, civil society, inequality, citizenship, and the relationship between cities and the federal government. Making the Mission brings these perspectives into focus by telling the history of one neighborhood with a particularly strong and deeply rooted planning tradition. Now, more than a decade into the twenty-first century, San Francisco’s Mission District has become perhaps the most visible battleground over gentrification in the United States. The neighborhood has long been home to Latino and bohemian communities, but it has increasingly become both a playground and a bedroom community for the well-heeled of the  Bay

Neighborhood Power in Twentieth-Century San Francisco / 3

Area, particularly technology professionals who work in Silicon Valley. During the dot-com boom of the 1990s, the Mission was the epicenter of a conflict over affordable housing and cultural identity. With the 2010s came a new wave of public offerings from technology firms, and the Mission is again at the center of a fight. Neighborhoods from Williamsburg in Brooklyn to Silver Lake in Los Angeles have witnessed a similar phenomenon. While they enjoy improved city services and falling crime rates, they simultaneously suffer through mass displacement of the working classes, minority communities, and artists and students. Residents who remain complain that their neighborhoods’ deeply rooted cultural identities are under threat. The Mission stands out among gentrifying urban areas for a few reasons. The fact that it is located in the geographical center of San Francisco, one of the country’s most expensive real estate markets, ensures that economic pressures and therefore social tensions are heightened. But economic tensions hardly appear less intense in places like Manhattan’s Lower East Side. What makes the Mission unique is the extent to which neighborhood groups have organized, and the savvy that they have demonstrated in enlisting the power of the state—particularly the tools of urban planning—to fight the tide. Present-day groups like the Artists Eviction Defense Coalition and the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition have not only distributed picket signs; they have also repeatedly convinced the city to reject permit applications from chain stores, to enact moratoria on condominium conversions, and to put in place strict if temporary limits on certain kinds of office development.5 These efforts have not halted real estate speculation or displacement, but most observers agree that they have slowed the process. Perhaps most importantly, these efforts have continued to reinforce the identity of the neighborhood and to convince people that the Mission has a unique and important culture, one that is worth fighting for. Why has the Mission District organized so effectively when other neighborhoods have been left to the mercy of the market? It’s no good to point to an amorphous ethos, like San Francisco liberalism, to explain the phenomenon. The Dog Patch and the Inner Sunset neighborhoods have both gentrified without much of a fuss. Even the iconic Haight-Ashbury District—once a crucible of cultural politics—has undergone profound changes without putting up much of a fight, at least not the way the Mission has. To understand the Mission’s organizing energies, one must look to history. In the mid-1960s, Mission residents openly worried that the coming of two Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) stations would spark a speculative boom that would push the poor and even the middle classes out

4 / Chapter One

of the Mission. This marked the first moment when fear of displacement prompted residents to organize. But to fully understand the resulting coalition, one must recognize its place in a long lineage of neighborhood-based groups, one that stretches back at least to the aftermath of the disaster of 1906, if not to the organizing efforts of the 1890s. From the time of the great earthquake and fire through today, both residents and visitors alike have described San Francisco’s Mission District as “a city within a city.” In the national discourse, this phrase has had a variety of duties; it was used to describe opulent world’s fairs, homogeneous minority neighborhoods, isolated slums, insular office-tower complexes, and newly minted suburban tracts, among other urban forms.6 But in the Mission, observers meant something else. There they saw not only a physically separate space, but also a self-sustaining urban unit. The Mission was an area with its own little downtown, a commercial district that “could clothe and feed you from the cradle to the grave,” as James Rolph would put it in 1930.7 Perhaps more importantly, observers saw a cohesive urban identity, one distinct from that of the larger city. That identity would change profoundly across the twentieth century—from elite suburb, to the home of white union labor, to a gateway for immigrant newcomers, to the barrio, and most recently to a gentrification battleground—yet the neighborhood has somehow always maintained its distinctiveness. Local historians have even reported that the area’s inhabitants once spoke with an accent all their own, a sort of Irish “Brooklynese,” though no recordings have survived to confirm that.8 But with or without a “Missionese” accent, few would dispute that the neighborhood has always been a world unto itself. In writing this book, I quickly found that it was no accident that the Mission came to function as a city within a city. Throughout the twentieth century, neighborhood residents cultivated an independent identity through festivals, architecture, ethnic politics, and in the area’s own newspapers, like the Mission Mirror, Mission Merchant’s News, Mission Enterprise, and, later, the New Mission/Nueva Misión. Yet I also found that the various forms of identification and cultural self-promotion were only the beginning of the story. The story was also about political power, particularly with respect to urban planning. The concept of a city within a city gave neighborhood residents— “Missionites,” as they proudly called themselves—a framework through which to assert their distinctiveness against the Fillmore District, the Marina District, downtown, Los Angeles, and the East Coast. But that was only part of the point of asserting an independent identity. When James Rolph referred to the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Mission as “a town within a

Neighborhood Power in Twentieth-Century San Francisco / 5

town,” he was not merely describing the neighborhood’s current condition; he was also describing the aspirations of both its leading citizens and its ordinary residents.9 For Rolph, as for many of his neighbors, it was not enough that one could visit a dentist, buy clothes, see a ballgame, or take in a movie without leaving the neighborhood. To truly be a city within a city, the neighborhood needed its own professional services and financial institutions. Most importantly, it needed a mechanism through which neighborhood residents might exert a measure of self-determination, particularly when it came to questions of schools and sewers, roads and rail connections. In other words, if there were decisions to be made about what should be built where, the residents of the neighborhood should be allowed to make those decisions for themselves. Motivated by these convictions, in the first decade of the twentieth century, Rolph and his associates founded the Mission Bank and the Mission Savings Bank, as well as the Mission Promotion Association (MPA), a civic group dedicated to uniting the residents of the Mission District and to guiding and promoting the physical development of the neighborhood.10 This association would become remarkably powerful. Not only would it exert decisive influence over the planning process in the Mission, but it would also effectively establish itself as the de facto planning authority for fully half of the geographic area of San Francisco, pushing through municipal government its own plans for park space, schools, rail connections, new roads, and much more, throughout the southern portion of the city, while blocking plans that its members believed were at odds with the interests of the Mission. The MPA held no official power, but it was widely acknowledged that the association nonetheless wielded decisive influence over the planning process. In the early twentieth century, the San Francisco Chronicle also described the Haight-Ashbury District as a “city within a city,” in the sense that it had its own retail district and its own character; but the newspaper anthropomorphized “the Mission,” writing about the neighborhood as though it were a political actor—indeed, as one of the most powerful political actors in San Francisco.11 Remarkable though the MPA’s accomplishments were, the association was only the first in a series of Mission-based groups that would effectively, and sometimes even officially, wield planning power within the neighborhood. The MPA operated from 1906 until 1920. In the 1920s, the Mission Merchants’ Association would take up the mantle and continue to influence the planning of the area. In the 1950s, the Mission Neighborhood Centers (MNC) would initiate a revitalization campaign that would soon involve city agencies and federal monies. In the l960s, using funds from

6 / Chapter One

the federal Model Cities program, a civic group called the Mission Coalition Organization (MCO) would found and effectively control both a planning authority, the Mission Model Neighborhood Corporation (MMNC), and a housing authority, the Mission Housing Development Corporation (MHDC), both of which had official standing as state entities. The Nixon administration’s 1973 moratorium on funding for Model Cities led quickly to the demise of the MCO and marks the end of this study—but not the end of neighborhood-based planning in the Mission. By exerting control over the process, this series of neighborhood groups established and reestablished “the Mission” as an actor among a larger cast of characters in the city, the region, and even the state. Both participants and observers of planning politics would speak of what “the Mission” wanted, or what “the Mission” opposed, in the same way that they might speak about what the California Department of Transportation wanted or what the Chamber of Commerce opposed. There were certainly moments when it did not much matter what the Mission wanted. When in the early 1950s elderly residents living in the path of the proposed Bayshore Freeway spoke out against the condemnation of their houses, their protests not only fell on deaf ears in city hall, but were even mocked in the daily press as a quaint reaction to inevitable progress.12 Similarly, during the Great Depression the Mission Merchants’ Association declared that the city’s housing authority was operating like “the Gestapo” when it announced plans for public housing projects in the neighborhood without having first consulted the local residents and businesses. The Merchants vowed to stop the projects, warning all comers that “the Mission has never taken anything lying down.”13 The Mission may not have taken the housing authority’s plans lying down, but neither did it win. Neighborhood groups struggled to be heard during the Great Depression and World War II, as well as during the immediate postwar period when freeway construction and slum clearance topped the agendas of urban planners. Yet even during the decades when local institutions appeared to be moribund, the area’s deeply rooted planning energies were still nurtured by entities like the Catholic parish churches, the Mission Merchants’ Association, the Mission Neighborhood Centers, and ordinary residents who remembered a time when “the Mission” determined its own fate. The embers were always there, and they would be reignited in the 1960s. The present study tells the story of how one neighborhood qua neighborhood was able to exert influence over the planning process over such a long period. Taking a step back, the historiography of urban America gives the impression that neighborhood-based planning existed, to a limited de-

Neighborhood Power in Twentieth-Century San Francisco / 7

gree, in the Progressive Era as a result of the efforts of improvement clubs and settlement houses, and again in the 1960s and 1970s under the auspices of Great Society programs and the Community Reinvestment Act.14 Studies focusing on the latter era advance a narrative of “rebirth.” This is not, however, a rebirth of neighborhood-based planning, but rather a rebirth of cities themselves; these studies narrate cities’ painful process of emerging from the urban crisis.15 Without discounting the many insights in these studies, Making the Mission argues not for a rebirth narrative but for a longer, continuous life of neighborhood-based planning. Ultimately, I argue that, for all their obvious differences, the improvement clubs of the Progressive Era and the Community Development Corporations of the 1970s need to be understood as different moments in a single lineage, not as two unrelated planning movements. Some historians have pointed to this longer lineage, though only one has undertaken a study of the entire period.16 A declension narrative dominates the scholarship on neighborhoods between the Progressive Era and the 1970s; those planning energies that do emanate from within neighborhoods appear limited to protestoriented activities, such as freeway revolts and anti–public housing campaigns.17 From the literature, then, one might guess that between the 1920s and the 1970s, neighborhoods spoke with a single voice only when they banded into single-issue interest groups, groups that splintered the moment the battle at hand was won or lost. The Mission District provides at least one example of a neighborhood where planning energies were less episodic and reactionary than they were durable, deeply rooted, and broad ranging. Even during those periods when the Mission-based organizations found themselves outmatched by other interests, they continued to play a role among a cast of other actors that have become archetypical in the historiography of urban America, entities that included construction unions, government agencies, elite families, chambers of commerce, corporations, political machines, and the editorial boards of daily newspapers. This book asks when, and under what circumstances, were neighborhood-based groups best able to guide the planning process? When and why did their influence wane? Making the Mission demonstrates that neighborhood groups were able to operate effectively only when certain institutional and cultural conditions were in place. Institutionally, there needed to exist a larger political climate—in city hall, as well as in state and federal agencies—that was conducive to decentralized decision making. The institutional climate within the neighborhood was important also. Internally, the most influential entities—including unions, merchants, churches, and civic groups—

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needed to form broad-based coalitions that could claim to represent the neighborhood as a whole. The cultural conditions were of course intertwined with the institutional ones, but were nonetheless distinct. In the most basic sense, neighborhood residents and groups needed to believe that there was such a thing as “the Mission” to begin with, and to commit psychological as well as material resources to the promotion, maintenance, and defense of that collective identity. So what did these institutional and cultural conditions actually look like on the ground?

The Institutional Life of Neighborhoods San Francisco enjoys a reputation for being an open place, one that welcomes and celebrates broad diversity. Not everyone has always experienced it as such—for example, both residents of Asian descent before World War  II and African Americans in the early 1960s often withstood brutal discrimination. But though there are some important exceptions, San Francisco’s popular reputation as a socially liberal place is largely deserved. That liberal cast helps to explain some of the cultural dimensions of the story told in this book, but it actually complicates the telling of the institutional side of the story. Neighborhoods like the Mission District were able to exert influence over the planning process not simply because San Francisco was generally welcoming to diverse cultures. In fact, for much of the twentieth century (and for the entire period discussed here), the governance context of the city made neighborhood power difficult to attain. This is largely explained by a feature of the city’s electoral system: atlarge voting. In many respects, San Francisco resembled the industrial cities of the East more than it did the Sunbelt cities—it always maintained a strong mayor system, for example. The City by the Bay did, however, share one important governance feature with the rising cities of the Southwest. The city adopted an at-large voting system with the passage of Progressive charter reform in 1900 and did not abandon it until 1977. The well-known story of Harvey Milk’s political career illustrates some of the historical complexities of this system. Milk’s first two runs for supervisor of San Francisco’s Castro District failed largely because of the fact that the entire city voted for candidates in each individual district. In this at-large voting system, the residents of the conservative Pacific Heights neighborhood had as much say over who would represent the Castro as did the residents of the Castro themselves. Milk became a viable candidate only when that at-large voting system was abandoned in favor of “district elections,” where only

Neighborhood Power in Twentieth-Century San Francisco / 9

the residents of the individual districts could vote for who would represent them on the Board of Supervisors. Twenty-first-century residents of San Francisco are accustomed to a system in which their supervisors fight vigorously for the interests of their neighborhoods or face accountability at the ballot box. So San Franciscans may be surprised to see, in the following pages, that while the entire Board of Supervisors makes frequent appearances, the Mission’s elected supervisor is discussed only sporadically and doesn’t appear to have been pivotal in the neighborhood’s planning debates. This is not an oversight, but a finding. Mission-based newspapers endorsed candidates for supervisor, but would otherwise pay little attention to the elected representative of the old District Six (which contained the Mission). Municipal reports, proceedings of the Board of Supervisors, planning documents, and newspaper accounts all illustrate that when citizens wanted a new park, or when a business wanted a zoning variance, they would bring their request first to one of the neighborhood’s civic groups, like the Mission Promotion Association or the Mission Merchants, or later to the Mission Coalition Organization. Citizens expected these groups to represent their interests in the larger city government.18 We know that in many of the urban centers on the East Coast, citizens went directly to their city councils with requests or complaints.19 In the Mission, neighborhood associations more often fulfilled that role. This book covers the period between the planning debates that raged in the wake of the disaster of 1906 and the moratorium on federal funding for the Model Cities program in 1973. At-large elections were in place from 1901 to 1977, which means that this story is firmly nested in a period in which neighborhoods were as likely to win planning power by working around their elected supervisors as through them. After 1977, San Francisco’s broader neighborhood politics would come to more closely resemble the ward system of Chicago. But the Mission’s route to power was different, situated, as it was, within the era of at-large elections. Yet within this larger framework, there were some moments when the governance context afforded more opportunities than others. To Decentralize? In Progressive Era San Francisco, political conditions were conducive to decentralized decision making, particularly in the arena of urban planning, for a number of reasons. After the great earthquake and fire of 1906, San Franciscans rejected a charter amendment that would have centralized

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planning authority in order to rationalize the city’s chaotic grid system. This left municipal government with limited means for implementing citywide plans, and thus ensured that most decisions over land use would be made on a more ad hoc basis. Not until 1917 would San Francisco even establish a planning commission, and in its early years the commission was relatively toothless, focusing primarily on drawing up the zoning map. Add to these conditions a generalized political instability—with strikes, graft investigations, and frequent turnovers of city hall—and the result was a political climate that enabled groups like the MPA to emerge and claim power. Through the 1920s, neighborhood groups would guide the planning process in the Mission, while also competing remarkably well in the citywide contest for tax and bond revenue. But if the most powerful neighborhood groups became adept at lobbying for municipal largesse during the Progressive Era, they found there was no longer any largesse to be lobbied for when the Great Depression struck. Empty city coffers were part of the reason that the political climate became adverse for the exercise of neighborhood power, but there was more to the story. As many observers have commented, the New Deal marked a fundamental reordering of the relationship between citizen and state, and between federal and municipal governments.20 Before the New Deal, the federal government was never much involved with questions of urban land use, except when it came to ports, rails, and military installations. While New Deal agencies like the Works Progress Administration, Public Works Administration, and the United States Housing Authority did much to revitalize the built environment of the Mission, they also concentrated planning power in municipal agencies and in the federal government itself. These organizational arrangements persisted through World War II and into the immediate postwar period, when traffic engineers and the heads of urban renewal agencies would be given a freer hand than any American planners had had before or have had since. During the New Deal and in the immediate postwar period, then, the technocratic and rigidly hierarchical governance context left little opportunity for smaller, unofficial interest groups to exert influence over the planning process. Yet that is not to say that those groups went away. On the contrary, they were there all along. By the late 1950s, having seen neighborhood after neighborhood vanish beneath the bulldozer, observers from many quarters around the country began to question the wisdom of technocratic and centralized planning, or what had sometimes been called “total planning.”21 Perhaps concentrating so much power in so few hands was resulting in destructive governmental overreach. These worries found expression not only in the nationwide

Neighborhood Power in Twentieth-Century San Francisco / 11

freeway revolt and protests and litigation over urban renewal plans, but also within San Francisco’s city hall and indeed within the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) itself. By the mid-1960s, even Justin Herman, the notoriously autocratic SFRA chief, began to occasionally push back against planning proposals that did not include real and substantial neighborhood involvement. At the federal level, too, things were changing. Though in some ways the Great Society can be described as a new New Deal, many of its programs took a fundamentally different view of where authority should reside. The Office of Economic Opportunity and the Model Cities program, in particular, were motivated by a conviction that decision-making power should be devolved to smaller units of organization. This meant that by the mid-1960s, public opinion, as well as sentiment within municipal and federal governments, had created a new policy climate, one in which neighborhood-based groups could once again claim planning power. For the first time in decades, the Mission had a real opportunity to reassert itself as a city within a city, not only physically, not only culturally, but also institutionally. Neighborhood residents seized this opportunity, winning Great Society funding to form a new network of organizations that exerted considerable influence over the planning of the neighborhood and represented the Mission in the city’s larger planning debates. But no sooner were these operations up and running than they found themselves in a more constrained political context on the heels of Nixon’s election in 1968. Conservative appointees to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) would soon balk at neighborhood-designed plans, particularly for low-income housing, plans that would have likely met easy approval under the Johnson administration. When Nixon summarily cut funding for Model Cities in 1973, an era of unprecedented neighborhood planning power came to an end. Yet the legacy of that era has persisted to the time of this writing, not only in the form of organizing energies but also institutional savvy.22 Coalition Building In the early twentieth century, a wide variety of civic and other nongovernmental organizations called the Mission District home. These included white ethnic clubs, Catholic parish congregations, homeowners’ groups, merchants’ associations, and unions. The last two types of groups were the most powerful in the neighborhood, and they also had the most reason to be suspicious of each other. Many business groups in San Francisco, most

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prominently the Chamber of Commerce, were well known for endorsing lockouts and open-shop campaigns. Labor groups, for their part, were well known for strikes and boycotts. However, the Mission’s powerful labor groups—most prominently the Building Trades Council (BTC) and the San Francisco Labor Council (SFLC)—made common cause with the Mission Merchants, and especially the MPA, around the amorphous goal of shared prosperity. In practice, this meant that labor could rely on Mission business groups to support the closed shop and to defend unions against anti-anarchist campaigns and a variety of other anti-labor tactics. It also meant that Mission business groups faithfully supported the unions’ radical positions on immigration restrictions, in spite of the fact that many business leaders in the neighborhood personally opposed such policies. On the other side, labor groups could be relied upon to support the MPA’s planning initiatives within the neighborhood; this was especially true of the building trades unions who saw jobs in such plans. Secure in its conviction that no substantial group would challenge its claim to truly represent the various interests in the neighborhood, the MPA was free to speak of “the Mission” as a singular entity, endowed with its own volition, its own desires, and its own hopes and fears. In the political context of Progressive Era San Francisco, the MPA would often encounter resistance to specific plans, but never to its claim to represent the Mission. The coalitions that made this possible were quite durable. It was not until public housing projects were proposed for the neighborhood in the mid-1930s that the Mission unions (who supported public housing) found themselves openly at odds with the homeowners’ groups, real estate interests, and the Merchants Association (who opposed it). Yet this crisis would be short-lived. Once the projects were built, the ever-pragmatic merchants abandoned their position that the new residents would put “the stigma of ‘slum area’ in the Greater Mission District,” and soon set about trying to win the new residents as customers.23 During the Depression and World War II, neighborhood coalitions frayed but never completely failed. Even so, the broader political context of the New Deal and the war left little room for the Mission’s coalitions to assert planning power. The immediate postwar period saw a shake-up of the organizational character of the neighborhood. The Merchants’ Association continued to thrive, as did the Catholic parish churches, but the unions, and many of the associated white ethnic organizations, began to move away. Many of the old German, Irish, Italian, and Scandinavian residents remained in the Mission, but many

Neighborhood Power in Twentieth-Century San Francisco / 13

also left. These latter residents were replaced by immigrants from Central America and Mexico, and the new arrivals soon organized both unions and ethnic mutual aid groups of their own. While this circumstance might have fostered mistrust and tension between the old guard and the newcomers, that is not in fact what happened. Once again, the pragmatic merchants took the position that one person’s money was just as good as the next’s, in spite of the fact that the merchants themselves remained overwhelmingly white. Eager to win Latino congregants away from the new Pentecostal storefront churches that began appearing around the neighborhood, the Catholic parish churches also made special efforts to accommodate the newcomers. With a strong tradition of ministering to union laborers, the aging Catholic clergy emphasized the common dignity of all people who worked for a living. This was to ease possible tensions between white old-timers and brown newcomers, and all available evidence suggests that while there was indeed some tension, the effort was surprisingly successful. But while the parish churches, white unions, Latino unions, merchants, and the emerging social service agencies all had amicable relationships during the immediate postwar period, the larger political context was such that there was little reason for any of them to hope that they might join forces to exert influence over the planning process. But when the political context began to shift in the 1960s, the Mission found itself better positioned than any other neighborhood in the city to take advantage of the new environment, thanks in no small part to a legacy of neighborhood organizing. Powerful coalitions were still fresh in the institutional memory of the unions, merchants, and Catholic parish churches. Indeed, the wisdom of coalition building seemed to constitute a kind of inherited common sense in the Mission. In the early 1960s, a social service group called the Mission Neighborhood Center partnered with the Merchants’ Association to invite the SFRA to join them in a collaborative planning exercise for the district. When the SFRA eventually proposed a plan that was not to the liking of anyone in the Mission, the neighborhood organized and succeeded in stopping the plan. Impressed by the capacities of the Mission, Mayor Joseph Alioto would put the neighborhood forward as a candidate for new Great Society programs that were designed to foster local planning efforts. With the help of organizers trained by Saul Alinsky, the churches and social service providers mounted an effort to form the Mission Coalition Organization (MCO), a broad-based group that claimed membership from conservative white

14 / Chapter One

homeowners’ clubs, unions, ethnic mutual aid groups, Latino social service providers, merchants, churches, and even self-described third-world nationalist groups. As one prominent organizer put it, the MCO “was the organization which represented the Mission . . . it was the organization recognized by the major public institutions in the City. While some of them sought to go around it, and even succeeded on occasion, they did so with the fear that MCO might come after them.”24 Like the MPA before it, the MCO was able to speak about what “the Mission” wanted without having its claims to representativeness challenged from outside. And as with the MPA before it, the MCO’s strength was rooted in the art of coalition building.

The Culture of Neighborhood Any collective actor is, in the end, a collection of individual people, and yet collective actors can operate in ways that the individuals who animate them cannot. This is most obviously the case with powerful and stable entities like corporations, city councils, or state governments. While many of these entities are much longer lived than the people who work in and through them, it is nonetheless true that all collective actors have their own histories, their own beginnings and inevitable ends. This fact comes sharply into focus when one considers informally organized entities like neighborhood groups. It is not only that small civic associations are often fragile, but that the very neighborhoods around which such groups cohere are themselves contingent. No large American city has ever vanished entirely, but many well-known neighborhoods have. The most obvious examples of neighborhood erasure were those brought about through clearance. Five Points does not exist anymore because the City of New York razed it; the physical area of the notorious nineteenth-century slum is now partly occupied by the Civic Center, partly by Chinatown, and partly by Columbus Park. After a San Francisco barber named Reggie Pettus was displaced by SFRA-led clearance, he observed that his beloved neighborhood, once known as the Fillmore, had become the “No More.”25 The Fillmore did survive urban renewal, but not in a form that Pettus recognized. He was not alone. But reorganizations of neighborhood geography need not be so dramatic and need not be carried out through official action. In the early twentieth century, a largely Spanish and South American neighborhood clustered at the foot of San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill; it was universally known as the Latin Quarter. Spanishspeaking residents gradually moved away from the area, while Italian and

Neighborhood Power in Twentieth-Century San Francisco / 15

Chinese immigrants gradually moved in, until, by the end of World War II, the neighborhood was no more.26 The street pattern remained, as did most of the buildings, but San Franciscans ceased to perceive the existence of a Latin Quarter, so it was simply absorbed by the larger North Beach. By contrast, some neighborhoods survive so long, and have such strong identities, that they come to seem like institutions within their larger cities, and in some senses they are indeed institutions. Entities like the Mission and Pacific Heights have had not only distinct identities but also stable associations with specific policy positions on a whole range of issues. It is of course civic groups that enunciate and renew such positions, but those groups gain legitimacy only insofar as they speak on behalf of the neighborhood. But partly because the status of such institutions was rarely official, neighborhoods were also amorphous, contested, and internally inconsistent. Neighborhoods typically had porous boundaries, both organizationally and spatially speaking. Figure 1.2 illustrates how various neighborhood-based interests and governmental agencies have drawn the Mission on the map of San Francisco. For the purposes of collecting garbage or counting votes, the borders of the neighborhood were unambiguous, but when it came to defining the Mission as a sociopolitical entity, the lines blurred considerably. The very boundaries of a neighborhood changed dramatically depending on who was drawing the lines when, and with what interests in mind. Yet if neighborhoods seem ephemeral when compared to other archetypical urban institutions, like political machines or business associations, it must be observed that these were not static either. Rather, they too were often contested and internally inconsistent, and they too had porous boundaries, at least in terms of their membership and the arenas in which they operated. Moreover, many entities that once seemed stable, even inevitable, have had their own trajectories. Thus, powerful unions wither under open-shop campaigns, public utility corporations have their operations municipalized, city agencies get defunded by charter amendments, and political coalitions fall apart. As with any other collective urban actor, the cohesion of a neighborhood depended upon the larger political context in which it operated, but also upon the material and psychological investments of the individuals who composed it. Throughout the twentieth century, groups in the Mission expressed their commitment to a collective identity in a variety of ways—in festivals, newspapers, architecture, and also through discourses about ethnicity—but the most basic strategy was a narrative one.

Figure 1.2. The Mission District within the larger city of San Francisco, as mapped by various public agencies and neighborhood-based entities. Upper left: “the Mission District proper,” as defined by the Mission Promotion Association in 1909 (MPA, “Constitution and Bylaws,” 1909, unpaginated MPA file, California Historical Society). Upper right: MPA’s mapping of the Mission in 1912; more modest mapping reflects the association’s new collaboration with city’s other prominent improvement clubs (San Francisco Examiner with Civic League and MPA, “Map of the Twelve City Beautiful Districts,” 1912, case D, map collection, Earth Science Library, University of California, Berkeley). Middle left: Home Owners’ Loan Corporation mapping of residential areas of the Mission District (HOLC residential survey map of San Francisco, 1937 National Archives II, RG195, location 450, 68:6:2/box 147). Middle right: Land use plan, plate 1, “The City-Wide Urban Renewal Plan,” 1960, 4–6, in DCP, 1963. Lower left: San Francisco Department of City Planning’s mapping of the Mission for the master plan (DCP, “District Names of San Francisco,” map, n.d. [1964–1968], John “Jack” Shelley Mayoral Papers, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, box 2, folder 11). Lower right: Mission Housing Development Corporation’s 1974 mapping of the Mission (MHDC, “A Plan for the Inner Mission,” book 1, page 3, 1974). Maps by Blake Swanson.

Neighborhood Power in Twentieth-Century San Francisco / 17

Cast of Characters: The Mission versus Downtown Every time a person spoke about the neighborhood as though it were an institution, the existence of that institution was reinforced. There are abundant accounts confirming that residents of the Mission thought of themselves as a distinct group, and that they took an almost “clannish” pride in that identity, as a resident named William Bauer put it.27 William Dunne, born in the neighborhood in 1897, recalls identifying as a “Mission Boy.”28 James Rolph Jr.—affectionately known as Mission Jim—had pet cocker spaniels named Mission Champion and Mission Prince. He recalled a horse in the neighborhood named Mission Lightning, which his family would eventually purchase.29 While these kinds of identifications were certainly playful, they were bound up with identifications that had real consequences in the larger political and planning debates of San Francisco. A recent study observes that in the 1930s, people living in the neighborhood described themselves not as residents but as “citizens” of the Mission, an identification that implied “a political independence from the city as well as a functional one.”30 Thus, homeowners’ groups in the neighborhood spoke not of the planning initiatives that they wanted but what the Mission wanted; and soon parent groups from Haight-Ashbury complained that the Mission ran the school board, while recreation officials objected that the Mission extracted more than its share of resources from the Parks Department.31 In the postwar period, Missionites frequently perceived an existential threat emanating from the Chamber of Commerce and from San Francisco’s downtown-oriented planning regime. In response, they invested time and resources into the defense of their neighborhood against the Redevelopment Agency and transportation planners. The postwar Missionites were thus renewing a tradition—one that dated back at least as early as the 1906 earthquake and fire—of organizing against downtown. Like “the Mission” itself, the term “downtown” described not only a physical space but, more importantly, a set of political and economic interests that had a stake in seeing that land was used in specific ways. Across the twentieth century can be traced a recurring narrative wherein the scrappy Mission did battle against the behemoth of downtown; it was a story that neighborhood residents and institutions appealed to even when it obscured the contours of a planning debate—and perhaps at moments because it was wise political strategy to obscure. This narrative was remarkably durable. The story was told from the perspective of the neighborhood, and it was neighborhood residents who cast

18 / Chapter One

the characters of “downtown” and “the Mission.” When neighborhood residents at the beginning of the century talked about downtown, they were referring largely to shipping companies and privately owned utilities. When postwar neighborhood residents said “downtown,” they were more often referring to transnational investment banks and the headquarters of global manufacturers. For both pre- and postwar Missionites, however, downtown referred to the city’s largest traditional banks, real estate firms, and department stores, as well as to the Southern Pacific railroad, and to any public agency that served those interests. If downtown had at least some continuity in its membership across the twentieth century, the individuals and institutions who cast themselves as the Mission changed almost completely. The early twentieth-century Mission was composed of powerful unions and a Progressive political elite; while the postwar Mission comprised social service agencies, Catholic parish churches, and multiethnic coalitions of poor people. The postwar Missionites only sometimes claimed the legacy of the prewar neighborhood, but they nonetheless inherited a physical and political context from their early twentieth-century counterparts. The narrative of the Mission versus downtown remained consistent, even as the issues changed and even as the individual actors playing the respective roles changed. In the twentyfirst century, residents are perhaps more likely to speak about Silicon Valley where they might once have referred to downtown, but even today the shape of that narrative remains remarkably true to its Progressive Era roots. This narrative construction was one important cultural strategy for asserting the identity of a city within a city, but this identity was also promoted in brick and mortar. Identity of the Built Environment In 1905 Daniel Burnham, the celebrated architect and city planner, offered a radical plan for San Francisco. Modeled on the revisions that Baron Haussmann had made to Second Empire Paris under Napoleon III, Burnham recommended building a neoclassical civic center and a series of ceremonial parks and parkways; he also recommended cutting dozens of grand boulevards through the dense, chaotic grid system of San Francisco. When the leaders of the Mission fought against this plan, they were concerned that carrying it out would require that city hall arrogate unprecedented planning power to itself. But they were also rejecting a radically transformative aesthetic vision that would have unified the entire city, making the

Figure 1.3. The athenaeum from Burnham’s plan for San Francisco, 1905. Daniel H. Burnham, Report on a Plan for San Francisco (San Francisco: Sunset Press, 1905).

Figure 1.4. The Mission Savings Bank, ca. 1910, at Sixteenth and Valencia Streets. Signage is visible below the clock. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, AAC-4560.

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neighborhood a subordinate part of a civic whole, one that literally and figuratively centered on the Civic Center. After the battle over the Burnham plan was won, the leaders of the Mission themselves seemed to realize the power of aesthetic politics and set about offering an alternative to Burnham’s totalizing neoclassical vision. The neighborhood had a ready-made visual trope to draw upon in its attempt to consolidate its distinctiveness, its status as a city within a city. In 1776 Spain’s de Anza expedition had founded the Misión San Francisco de Asís, on a site that would later become Sixteenth and Dolores Streets, in the Mission. In the nineteenth century, Anglo residents of the neighborhood and the larger city had turned their back on the old settlement, allowing it to fall into disrepair. But in the early twentieth century, neighborhood boosters perceived an opportunity to capitalize on their architectural patrimony. After all, the Mission District was the oldest inhabited area of the city. Did this venerability not give the neighborhood a special claim to civic legitimacy? The Mission was more San Francisco than San Francisco, the logic seemed to go, and its residents were therefore the inheritors of a noble tradition. The MPA and its allies promoted this identity in print, but they cultivated it most prominently in stucco cladding, scalloped parapets, and red-tiled roofs. In a process that is familiar from Southern California, the MPA employed a Spanish colonial architectural language in order to celebrate a prosperous Anglo future by memorializing a romanticized past.32 This style would remain popular until the 1930s, when private building ground to a halt. The Mission continued to receive investment in its built environment, but now the investment came almost exclusively through New Deal programs. This marked a new political context in which neighborhood-based groups saw their influence over the planning process diminished, and in which the neighborhood’s unions and merchants found themselves in conflict for the first time in decades. These changes registered in the built environment when the New Deal agencies eschewed the merchants’ preferred Spanish colonial aesthetic in favor of a modernist idiom that was frankly inspired by European socialist experiments, experiments that aesthetically celebrated the nobility of labor. This is particularly significant since in many other places, New Deal agencies did cater to Spanish colonial tastes—but hardly at all in the Mission. The new school facilities and public housing projects reaffirmed the Mission’s status as a city within a city, but they symbolically elevated the status of workers among the collection of groups that constituted the Mission. Not until the 1960s would the neighborhood witness another serious building campaign. When the Mission groups finally had an oppor-

Neighborhood Power in Twentieth-Century San Francisco / 21

tunity to revitalize their aging housing stock, they faced a choice about how to represent the neighborhood to itself, how to assert the strength of the neighborhood’s collective identity. The multiethnic but largely Latino MCO advanced a critique of Spanish colonialism, viewing the enterprise as naked exploitation of indigenous peoples. So when the SFRA proposed a Spanish heritage center for the neighborhood, the idea would meet with a hostile reception from the MCO. The boosters’ romantic vision was no longer representative of the new Mission, the nueva Misión. But if the MCO had no interest in perpetuating the image of a colorful ethnic idyll, nor did it opt for the internationalist language of the neighborhood’s New Deal fabric. Rather, the neighborhood groups now tended toward a more local style, known as Bay Area regionalism; it was a style that mixed the flat roofs and creative massing of modernist buildings with local details like bay windows and shingle cladding. This architecture announced that, for the MCO and its affiliates, the collective identity of the Mission was multiethnic but also modern and American. The evolution of visual culture in the neighborhood brings into focus another crucial arena in which the distinctiveness of the Mission was constructed: ethnic identity. Neighborhood Identity as Ethnic Identity Throughout the twentieth century, the mobilization of ethnic politics was an indispensable strategy in building successful planning coalitions. In the 1910s and 1920s, for example, labor unions won crucial support for their Asiatic exclusion and “Anti-Jap” campaigns from Mission District Progressives; the Progressives, in turn, backed these campaigns in exchange for union support of their planning agenda. Thus the Mission formed a powerful coalition that could claim to speak on behalf of the neighborhood. But the relationship between urban planning and ethnicity was not simply a story about the inclusion or exclusion of statically defined demographic groups. Broader shifts in the very boundaries of ethnicity—who was to be considered white, who racialized—were accomplished in no small part through debates over urban planning power, a fact best illustrated by the shifting status of Latinos. In the prewar period, there is evidence that Latinos faced prejudice in a variety of institutions. However, San Francisco planners, lenders, and realtors regarded Latinos as white. In the San Francisco housing market, that white status was not an artifact of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo or of census categories (as it was, for example, in the well-known 1946 case of

22 / Chapter One

Mendez v. Westminster); Latinos’ whiteness was a social fact, at least in the arena of housing. In 1920, the new suburban developments of western San Francisco carried racial covenants barring persons of “African,” “Asiatic,” “Mongolian,” “Japanese,” and “Chinese” descent. No other groups were named.33 Across the San Francisco Bay in Alameda County, meanwhile, one could find covenants explicitly barring persons of “Mexican” descent.34 When the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) conducted its residential survey of the city in 1937, it described a number of largely Latino neighborhoods as white, and it explicitly referred to both “Porto Ricans” and “Mexican-Spanish” residents in the larger city as “white.”35 In the postwar period, however, a variety of factors contributed to a dramatic shift in the status of Latinos. As the immigration of poor Mexicans and Central Americans accelerated, conservative voices in the planning debates came to perceive a new critical mass that would be harder to assimilate than the city’s prewar Latino population had been. From this downtown-affiliated and self-described “white Anglo-Saxon Protestant” perspective, the new immigration posed a threat, not only to property values but also to public order and safety.36 At the same time, however, the civil rights, farmworker, and the Third World Liberation movements all encouraged minority populations to claim and defend their ethnic identities. This invitation became increasingly attractive to Mission Latinos, who were becoming less content with the meager and dwindling protections that their invisibility, as Latinos, had afforded them. The Johnson administration’s War on Poverty provided tangible incentives for poor minority populations to identify as poor minorities. In the Mission, those incentives came in the form of funding for social programs and planning efforts from the Office of Economic Opportunity and the Model Cities program. But because the Mission was decidedly multiethnic, primarily Anglo and Latino, no one group could claim to represent the entire neighborhood in the pursuit of this funding. Understanding this, organizers acknowledged and celebrated the very multiethnicity of the neighborhood, creating coalitions that could claim to truly represent the Mission. These coalitions faced challenges that will be discussed in this book, but the organizing efforts were remarkably successful. The Mission was able to project an identity as a unified, multiethnic interest in the larger planning politics of San Francisco. Between 1906 and 1973, ethnicity remained central to the process of building successful planning coalitions and in forging a collective identity for the neighborhood. The manner in which ethnicity functioned, how-

Neighborhood Power in Twentieth-Century San Francisco / 23

ever, changed almost completely. In the Progressive Era, the Mission’s planning coalition was consolidated around the defense of whiteness against the perceived aggression of “Asiatics.” “The Mission,” as an actor in urban politics, was white. In the Great Society period, by contrast, Model Cities funding depended upon the cohesion of a broad-based, multiethnic coalition. This meant that governance structures now provided incentives for claiming ethnic and racial identities that were only very recently grounds for exclusion from decision-making power. The Mission’s experience thus demonstrates that urban planning was an important arena in which the political valences and the very boundaries of ethnicity were redefined.

Urban Scales and National Stories Urban histories have tended, almost as a default, to ask questions at the scale of the city. If one wishes to analyze the daily press or electoral politics, or to conduct an institutional history of a municipal planning department, this is probably the appropriate scale. However, if one wishes to analyze planning power, more broadly conceived, the city may be an inappropriate frame. Indeed, with some planning questions, to focus solely on the municipal scale is to risk picking sides in historical contests over political power. So when historians describe the rejection of Burnham’s scheme as “The Defeat of Planning,” they conceive of planning far too narrowly, inadvertently suggesting that the grand neoclassical vision that was sponsored by the city was the only vision on offer, or at least the only one that qualified as “planning.”37 Though some of these works are quite sophisticated, they ignore the fact that there were competing planning agendas. Even though they were not expressed in grand diagrams and Greek statuary, even if they had less power to stir men’s blood, these were planning agendas, nonetheless. A number of unexamined assumptions accompany this established interpretation. The main trouble is that the analysis takes for granted that planning was only the activity of municipal governments, operating with centralized authority to guide land use throughout an entire city. This was of course the definition advocated by the emerging planning profession and its Progressive allies, but it was a controversial one indeed. To accept the planning profession’s self-descriptions here is to brush aside the good-faith objections of neighborhood advocates, immigrant groups, and laissez-faire elements of the business community, among many others. In this view, physical developments that were not guided by the emerg-

24 / Chapter One

ing planning profession, wielding state power, did not qualify as planned developments. It follows that the subsequent growth of San Francisco was relatively unplanned. All of these interpretations need to be tested, rather than assumed. The experience of the post-1906 Mission District suggests that the outcome of the Burnham debates should be seen not as the defeat of planning but rather as a victory for one planning agenda over another. The successful vision was one in which the city would grow incrementally and in which land use decisions would be decentralized, largely guided by interest groups rather than municipal government. The informal character of this vision did not make it any less a planning agenda; indeed, the agenda was precisely to keep land use decisions decentralized and to grow incrementally. Beginning at least as early as 1961—when Jane Jacobs published her celebrated “attack on current city planning” in The Death and Life of Great American Cities—discussions of public housing and of urban renewal have revealed many of the same assumptions about what does and what does not constitute planning.38 For all the venom of her attack on out-oftouch technocrats wielding centralized power, Jacobs never suggests that planning power might be decentralized. Rather, her overarching goal was to convince those same planners that they should simply think of cities differently—as complex “organisms.”39 For all her suspicion of academically trained, bureaucratic planners, and for all her celebration of the vibrancy of neighborhood life, Boston’s old North End for Jacobs was the result not of planning but of organic, free-market processes that official planners only needed to understand and harness.40 But was the North End really “organic” to begin with? Would the suggestion that it was unplanned withstand scrutiny? Had not the residents and local institutions engaged in activities that might fairly be called “planning”? Reflecting much of the same conceptual framework, when public housing or urban renewal projects were carried through, the episodes are often described as “victories” for planning; when they were not, the episodes are cast as “defeats” for planning. In both cases, though, planning is defined narrowly as the activities of government agencies, operating with centralized authority. To present such debates only as zero-sum contests—where planning will win or lose—is often to diminish the significance of durable energies emanating from homeowners’ associations and PTA chapters, social service providers and neighborhood block groups, protest organizations and rotary clubs. When such entities proposed and promoted specific uses of land, they were engaged in planning every bit as much as the

Neighborhood Power in Twentieth-Century San Francisco / 25

Planning Department was. This imbalance in the historiography is largely explained by the reliance on the municipal scale of analysis. A number of recent studies have highlighted the fact that many processes—pertaining to race, income inequality, infrastructure, environmental impacts, and more—were not constituted solely at the scale of the municipality, but this literature has tended to focus on larger metropolitan regions.41 While there are many excellent studies that ask questions at the scale of the neighborhood, those works tend to treat neighborhoods as backdrops or containers for processes like urbanization, “underdevelopment,” ethnic “transition,” racial identity construction, class formation, or gentrification, but most do not consider neighborhoods as social processes in and of themselves.42 Few treat neighborhoods as institutional actors, and those that do tend to focus on one decisive moment, like a battle over an urban renewal project or a freeway.43 Garrioch and Peel have published a useful survey of the literature on neighborhoods in the Journal of Urban History. Their article confirms that little “consideration has been given to the long-term history of neighborhood.” Further, Garrioch and Peel conclude that the classic form of urban neighborhood studies, if they consider change at all, is a before-and-after tableau: the neighborhood at its peak, followed by its decline. The factors identified as causing that decline vary considerably, but the template remains the same, for the master narrative is underpinned by contemporary social concerns and particularly by anxieties about the future of our cities. A consequence of this master narrative is that, whatever the time frame, most work on neighborhood portrays it as fragile, threatened by whatever large-scale changes are taking place.44

Many strong studies have been produced in this vein, but collectively they portray neighborhood-based planning as episodic and reactionary. In many cases, neighborhood-based planning was indeed episodic and reactionary, but in many others planning energies were durable and deeply rooted. These cases remain understudied. To consider those stories is an important exercise, if we wish to fully appreciate the influence of a certain type of urban interest group: the neighborhood-based organization. Because residents took it for granted that such groups were influential, and because residents so identified with the areas where they lived, it is also important to consider the longer history of neighborhood-based planning for the sake of understanding ordinary urbanites as they understood themselves.

26 / Chapter One

Regional Variation Recent work by a number of scholars—most prominently Robert Self and Mark Brilliant—demonstrate that urban politics and race relations in California did not follow those of the Northeast or the South.45 The story of the Mission District provides further evidence that this was the case. For example, the race relations described in the pages that follow differed from those on the West Side of Chicago; the Progressives’ views about neighborhood governance differed from those that held sway in Boston’s Jamaica Plain; the Mission’s Alinsky-inspired community mobilization differed from the mobilization of Chicago’s Back of the Yards.46 While studies of Chicago, Boston, and New York certainly do help us to understand San Francisco, they often do so by providing points of contrast. The purpose of these discussions is not simply to point out where San Francisco and the West Coast were distinctive, but to refine our picture of larger urban historical patterns. Some frameworks that historians have presumed to apply nationally take on a more regional cast, as with the activities of the federal home finance agencies of the 1930s. Other frameworks seem to hold with ever more force, as with the unprecedented concentration of authority in the hands of transportation planners and redevelopment agencies in the decades following World War II. A further word is merited about the prominence of Chicago and Los Angeles in this study. The Second City will make frequent appearances in the pages that follow for several reasons. First, Chicago and San Francisco both hosted large Latino populations.47 Second, as with Chicago, many observers have described San Francisco as “a city of neighborhoods,” a place where political interests from smaller geographical scales were capable, at least at certain moments, of exerting decisive influence over the planning process.48 The third reason to compare San Francisco to Chicago is a purely practical one, related to the shape of the historiography: when it comes to scholarly literature on neighborhoods, Chicago is far and away the best-studied city in the United States. Indeed, no neighborhood-based study would be complete without at least some reference to the literature on Hyde Park, Back of the Yards, or Lawndale-Crawford, among other areas. For the sake of situating San Francisco in a larger frame of America’s Pacific cities, Los Angeles also figures prominently in the pages that follow. As with Chicago and San Francisco, Los Angeles hosted a large Latino population. It will likely surprise some readers to find that when it came to the status of Latinos, Los Angeles had more in common with Chicago than it did with its neighbor up the California coast. Los Angeles also serves

Neighborhood Power in Twentieth-Century San Francisco / 27

as a crucial point of contrast for questions of labor and urban renewal. Here, again, the point is not simply that San Francisco was different, but that some popular ideas about urban regions require further refinement. Though it is sometimes described as “the prototypical Western metropolis,” the present study adds ballast to a countervailing view, dating back at least to the classic works of Carey McWilliams, that Southern Californian urbanism is a distinct phenomenon.49 Los Angeles is probably better understood as a proto-Sunbelt city than a prototypical western city. If it makes sense to speak of “West Coast urbanism,” then it is difficult to see how the West Coast extends south of Monterey. A final reason for presenting this kind of study is that the method is simply underused, and different features capture our attention when we observe a familiar landscape through a different lens. In more concrete terms: the exercise of focusing on a specific neighborhood over a long period has forced me to explain the larger implications of a number of apparent anomalies. If improvement clubs were concerned only with playgrounds and potholes, then why was the Mission’s improvement club at the center of so many planning debates that concerned the entire city and even the state? If Latinos were everywhere a racialized group, then why did San Francisco’s pre–World War II planners and real estate interests consistently describe them as white? If the federal home finance agencies redlined areas primarily on the basis of race, then why was the wealthy and white Nob Hill shaded red on the HOLC’s map of the city, and why did only two of the seventeen red-shaded areas in the city host racial minorities? If “inner city” neighborhoods experienced a precipitous sequence of disinvestment, white flight, and decline, then why did the Mission retain so much of its white population and build multiethnic coalitions with Latino newcomers? If the encounter between urban renewal and poor minority communities was everywhere a story conflict and confrontation, then why did Mission-based groups originally pursue urban renewal? The fact that all of these questions can be asked in the first place demonstrates that the Mission was in many ways an exceptional neighborhood. But it is a mistake to assume that it was an exception that proved the rule. Making the Mission demonstrates that the neighborhood was just as often an exception that helps to establish a number of principles: some Progressive Era neighborhood associations wielded tremendous influence in larger planning debates and in city politics; the racial status of Latinos was profoundly dependent upon local context; New Deal programs did not have uniform impacts on cities around the country; at least some early urban renewal plans were actually sensitive to existing physical and social

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fabric; and at least some of the neighborhood opposition groups of the mid-1960s were less oppositional and more pragmatic than they are often thought to have been. The central contention of Making the Mission is that neighborhood-based planning did not emerge in the 1960s and 1970s. Its history is much longer, and its aims much broader, than is normally understood.

Structure of This Book After this introductory chapter, Making the Mission will proceed chronologically through four distinct periods of the neighborhood’s history, periods that I define here in terms of institutional context. The first period might be called a long Progressive Era, when neighborhood-based civic groups were able to exert decisive influence over the planning process within the Mission. The second period covers the New Deal and World War II, when federal policies enabled a centralization of planning power. The third covers the immediate postwar period when that concentration of power reached its apogee through highway planning and the early years of the federal urban renewal program. The fourth and final period covers the Great Society and the devolution of planning power back to neighborhoods. Within each of these sections, the book will alternate between chapters that deal with the institutional narrative, on the one hand, and the shifting cultural politics that underlie and reinforce institutional change, on the other. Chapter 2 covers the rise of the Mission Promotion Association (MPA) and its fight over the Burnham plan. Chapter 3 shows the full range of the MPA’s influence and analyzes its institutional structure. Chapter 4 shows how this institutional context was underwritten by an aesthetic politics that celebrated a romantic Spanish past while warning of an Asian threat in the present, all to promote Anglo prosperity. Chapter 5 deals with a demographic change that is difficult to trace: the influx of Latinos into the Mission District in the early 1930s, earlier than was previously thought. Chapter 6 shows how the federal public works agencies revitalized the built environment of the Mission, while simultaneously centralizing planning authority in the municipality. Chapter 7 shows how the federal home finance agencies fundamentally remade the institutional context in which planning power was negotiated by partnering with downtown-affiliated business interests. Chapter 8 focuses on highway planning and the early years of the urban renewal program in San Francisco, showing how these programs remade the physical fabric of the city while further centralizing planning power. Chapter 9 chronicles the ways in which the Mission’s

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Catholic parish churches and merchants both contributed to a reimagining of the boundaries of ethnicity, helping to forge new multiethnic coalitions. Chapter 10 shows exactly why that cultural unity would become important in the 1960s, as the neighborhood organized to negotiate with the SFRA over a plan for the neighborhood. Chapter 11 traces the Mission’s encounter with the redevelopment agency. Chapter 12 chronicles the rise of the MCO, explaining how it was able to gain control over Model Cities funding, then considers the reasons behind the coalition’s dissolution.

T WO

Make No Big Plans: The City Beautiful Meets Improvement Clubs The great earthquake and fire of April 1906 radically transformed San Francisco not just through destruction but also by forcing a reimagining of city’s urban fabric. To neighborhood residents who saw the new Mission Park filling with refugee shacks as the month drew to a close, the thought of coming change must have produced a mixture of anxiety and hope. Of the 508 city blocks that burned, only about 40 were in the Mission, but the neighborhood’s proximity to downtown all but guaranteed that the hundreds of Mission blocks that had been spared would have to accommodate displaced people and displaced economic activity. (See fig. 2.1.) Surely the neighborhood would have to be built up; land use would have to be intensified. But how would it be built up, and who would decide what would be built where? Who would benefit from these decisions, and who would lose out? Presumably any changes to the neighborhood would be made in the name of the public interest, but the definition of the public interest was up for grabs, as indeed was the question of who belonged to the public to begin with. Was the city a single, unified public? Or were there multiple, competing publics? In the discussions surrounding relief efforts, there was broad consensus that everyone was in this together, that San Francisco was indeed a unified public. With tongue in cheek, some remarked upon a new phenomenon called “earthquake love.”1 But whatever love the earthquake engendered quickly waned in the subsequent discussions about the rebuilding effort. Soon the city fractured into multiple publics, many constituting themselves at the scale of neighborhoods and coalescing around differing ideas about private property, infrastructure provision, and the appropriate scope of governmental authority.2 At the center of the debate was a visionary planning document that had been released only months before the

Figure 2.1. California State Earthquake Investigation Commission, “San Francisco Burnt Area,” 1908. Superimposed white line indicates the boundaries of the Mission District.

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disaster. Daniel Burnham, best known as the planner of the White City— the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago—had been invited to San Francisco by a civic group led by Progressive businessmen. Modeled on Baron Haussmann’s revisions to Second Empire Paris, Burnham proposed sweeping changes, opening new parks and extending old ones, building a civic center, erecting monuments, widening streets, and cutting a series of grand boulevards through the dense grids of San Francisco. The plan was supported by the Progressive businessmen and civic leaders who had commissioned it, but it was also supported by the city’s powerful building trades and the Union Labor administration that held city hall. Arrayed against the plan were conservative business interests. These individuals and groups had fought the municipalization of utilities and were even less interested in granting the municipality the expanded powers of eminent domain that would be required to make Burnham’s plan a reality. The typically Progressive neighborhood improvement clubs also found themselves in opposition—not because they opposed the expansion of municipal authority, per se, but because they feared that they would be called upon to finance expensive projects that would primarily benefit “downtown,” a loose designation that referred not only to a geographical area but also to many of the conservative businessmen with whom the neighborhoods now formed an uncomfortable alliance. When the earthquake struck, it shook the city’s already fragile political foundations, opening cracks through which new coalitions could emerge. In response to the Burnham plan, the business community in the Mission District united to create a civic group—the Mission Promotion Association (MPA)—that succeeded in defining the Mission District as a coherent whole, a discrete public, within the political spheres of the city, the Bay Area, and even the state of California. In so doing, they helped to defeat the Burnham plan, assuring that the city would be rebuilt along existing property lines. More importantly, as far as the future of the Mission was concerned, they won recognition for the neighborhood as a logical and natural locus of urban planning power. In the debates that raged over the question of how San Francisco would be rebuilt, the Mission District emerged as an unlikely winner. In order to fully appreciate the nuances of this story, it is useful to begin with some background on the neighborhood.

Country Living in the Mission District In 1868 a young Scottish woman named Margaret Nicol met a young Londoner named James Rolph aboard a ship that had set sail from Liverpool,

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bound for San Francisco. The couple married immediately upon their arrival and moved into a small cottage on Minna Street, in the South of Market District. In 1869, Margaret gave birth to a son, James Jr., who would become mayor of San Francisco and later governor of California. The elder James took a job as a cashier at the Bank of California, and by 1873, the couple had realized a dream of moving out to the Mission. A 1930 biography of James Rolph Jr. recounted that a “house at 3416 Twenty-first street was bought and the Rolph family became country dwellers.”3 James  Jr. recalled a childhood spent in a large garden with stables and chicken coops. Neighborhood children hunted blackberries, rabbits, and quail on the gentle slopes that culminated in Twin Peaks. The neighborhood also boasted swimming opportunities for youngsters, with a number of lagoons and easy access to the bay.4 A woman named Irene Jensen Stark, a daughter of Danish parents who arrived in the 1890s, recalled a similarly bucolic childhood in the neighborhood.5 Jensen’s father was a fireman who built and sold a series of houses for the family, contributing to the slow but steady growth of the Mission through the end of the century. Census data suggest that the experience of the Rolphs and the Jensens was typical. In 1900, 95 percent of the Mission’s residents lived with family members or spouses, and only a tiny fraction of the women worked for a paycheck.6 While the Mission was occupationally diverse, it was nearly 100 percent white, with about a quarter foreign-born and three-quarters of foreign parentage. Irish and Germans formed the largest groups, followed by Scandinavians and Italians. Sanborn fire insurance maps mark a handful of buildings as “Chinese laundries,” and one large plot was marked as “Chinese gardens.”7 But the Chinese and other nonwhite populations were sparse. White ethnic groups did form some small concentrations, but the neighborhood was not segregated, in any sense, among white ethnicities. Though churches and social clubs tended to serve particular national backgrounds, newspapers and oral histories give no evidence of tension among those different groups. Indeed, neighborhood residents recalled that intermarriage between ethnic/nationality groups was commonplace and uncontroversial.8 Most major Protestant denominations were represented in the neighborhood, and there were six Catholic parish churches.9 Marrying outside the faith might produce a little tension, but not much more than that.10 The lack of stratification among white ethnicities made the Mission typical of broader San Francisco. The fact that the city had been a frontier town, with an overwhelmingly immigrant population, helps to explain several features of the sociopolitical landscape. Without a large population

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of native-born Protestants of British heritage, to say nothing of Yankees or Brahmins, the conditions for claiming a white, American identity were much more liberal in San Francisco than they were in most cities east of the Mississippi.11 No white ethnic group necessarily occupied a higher social position than any other.12 The Irish in San Francisco, for example, were not only laborers, “machine” politicians, and union officials but also old money elites, Progressive politicians, and prominent businessmen.13 Men with Irish and German surnames were at least as likely to hold public office as were men with English surnames.14 Catholics were at least as likely to hold office as were Protestants, and they predominated in the larger population of the city.15 One study reports that there were four churchgoing Catholics for every one churchgoing Protestant.16 The leaders of San Francisco were overwhelmingly the sons of European immigrants, or were themselves immigrants, until after World War II. But if the Mission was unremarkable in terms of its ethnic makeup, it was surprisingly diverse in terms of class and occupation at the turn of the century.17 White-collar workers mingled with artisans and skilled laborers, all of whom mingled with a handful of the city’s elite residents who were drawn to the Mission for its country amenities and because it was the sunniest, warmest area in a foggy, windy city. Hubert Howe Bancroft, the historian and publishing magnate, built a personal library on Valencia Street near Army Street (today Cesar Chavez Street). James Phelan was a son of a Forty-Niner who had become a merchant, banker, and major San Francisco real estate interest; while he was mayor (1897–1902), Phelan lived in a mansion on Valencia and Seventeenth Streets. John D. Spreckels, the publisher and sugar magnate, had a mansion on Howard (today South Van Ness) and Twentieth Streets. His brother Adolph was also in the neighborhood. These established elites were, however, a minority. The corridor that ran between Howard and Guerrero Streets, from about Fourteenth Street south to Twenty-Sixth Street, was occupationally the most diverse area of the neighborhood. James Rolph’s substantial piece of property in this corridor was surrounded by as many flats as single-family houses.18 Phelan and Spreckels lived here among not only lawyers and pharmacists, clerks and conductors, but also foremen and superintendants, boilermakers and even a few day laborers.19 The low hills around Guerrero and Twenty-Second Streets formed a distinct residential area that would later be known as Liberty Hill. This area was home to many blue-collar workers, but it was also home to a concentration of white-collar immigrant families who produced much of the future leadership of the city. Among the children raised in this area were

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Matthew Sullivan, who would become a supervisor, head of the California State Republican Party, and Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court; Timothy Pflueger, who by the 1930s was an internationally recognized architect in the Art Deco idiom; Robert Sproul, future president of the University of California; and Henry Grady, who would serve as United States ambassador to India, Nepal, Greece, and Iran.20 The most celebrated figure from the neighborhood, however, was James Rolph. The Mission was a streetcar neighborhood. By 1902 there were rail lines running down almost all of the north–south thoroughfares, including Mission, Valencia, Howard, Folsom, Harrison, Bryant, and Guerrero Streets as well as a number of crosstown lines. Beginning from the Civic Center area and heading south down either Mission or Valencia, a visitor would have found that nearly every lot was built up, for several blocks to the east and west, until one arrived at about Twenty-Fifth Street, where the buildings thinned out. But from Fourteenth Street down to Twenty-Fifth Street, visitors could walk five or six blocks to the east of Mission Street or to the west of Valencia Street and soon find themselves cutting through the middle of blocks that had more vacant lots than improved ones.21 North of Fourteenth Street, land use became more light industrial, with a concentration of garment factories and food-processing operations, particularly breweries. Sanborn fire insurance maps show that if an average residential block south of Fourteenth Street contained about 80 percent single-family houses and about 20 percent multi-unit dwellings, north of Fourteenth Street the proportion was closer to 50-50. As one traveled further northeast on Mission, past Twelfth Street and into the South of Market District, single-family dwellings gave way to multifamily units and light industrial buildings, until one arrived at Second Street and the San Francisco Bay, where there were virtually no single-family houses. Fewer residents in the South of Market held managerial positions, and more were unskilled laborers; fewer residents were women, and more were young bachelors; fewer were the children of immigrants, and more were immigrants themselves. Though many of the Mission’s residents were unionists, the union halls clustered in the South of Market District, on or near Market Street. In the area near the docks, South of Market was intimately tied to the downtown flows of capital and people.22 The Mission, on the other hand, was “highly self-sufficient.”23 Rolph remembered that by the turn of the century, “the Mission had a complete shopping district. It could clothe and feed you from the cradle to the grave. No need to spend carfare going to the Market and Grant Avenue stores. Prices were lower in the Mission and merchandise just as satisfactory. The district was like a town within a town.”24

Make No Big Plans / 39

Local historians have reported that the Missionites, as they were known, had an accent all their own: a sort of Irish “Brooklynese.”25 We await a rigorous analysis to confirm this, but there are abundant accounts that do confirm that Mission residents identified as a distinct group, and that they took an almost “clannish” pride in that identity, as one Missionite put it.26 A photograph from the early twentieth century shows two teenage boys standing in front of a novelty set depicting the skyline of San Francisco from the vantage point of a ferry in the bay; the boys stand over a valise upon which is prominently written in capital letters, “We’re from the Mission. Now laugh!—Darn you.”27 William J. Dunne, who was born in the neighborhood in 1897, recalled identifying as a “Mission Boy.”28 Another Mission boy named Frank Quinn recalled an “old Mission District refrain”: Oh, I was born in the Mission M- I- DOUBLE S- I- O- N; Where the girls are the fairest, The boys are the rarest, M- I- DOUBLE S- I- O- N.29

James Rolph Jr., or “Mission Jim,” had pet cocker spaniels named Mission Champion, Mission Chief, and Mission Prince, and his family purchased a horse named Mission Lightning.30 Mission residents were proud to be Missionites. At the turn of the century, the neighborhood’s main economic motor was the retail corridor that ran down Mission and Valencia Streets, from about Fourteenth Street to Army Street. From Rolph’s perspective, it was only the lack of financial institutions that kept the neighborhood from being truly self-sufficient. Now it is important to note that the Mission was never independent of downtown San Francisco in any absolute sense, just as San Francisco was never absolutely independent of Oakland or San Jose, or even Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver, and certainly Washington, D.C. Urban systems are, by their very nature, interdependent. They rely on one another in myriad ways: labor markets, infrastructure, service provision, natural-resource distribution, food systems, risk sharing—in all of these arenas and more, neighborhoods need cities, and cities need other cities, to survive. However, when one looks at the Mission next to other urban neighborhoods, it was comparatively self-sufficient; and Rolph was correct that neighborhood-based financial institutions would consolidate that independence. By now Rolph was in his early thirties and had established himself as

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a successful entrepreneur, an importer/exporter on his way to becoming a shipbuilder.31 Leveraging his reputation, in 1902 Rolph convinced the Bank of California to sponsor a residential bank in the neighborhood, San Francisco’s first, with himself as president and with prominent Mission citizens, including his childhood friend Matt Sullivan, as board members.32 The Mission Bank opened in 1903 on Sixteenth Street between Mission and Valencia Streets. (See fig. 2.2.) So successful was the institution—sometimes referred to by residents as the “Rolph bank”—that three years later Rolph and Sullivan opened a second financial institution, the Mission Savings Bank, to serve residents in the southern part of the neighborhood.33 The Mission had established itself as a “town within a town,” as Rolph put it, an area that was, to a large degree, economically and culturally autonomous.34 Of course that autonomy depended entirely upon the provision of infrastructure and services. Without roads and sewers, parks and police, the Mission could not have been the town within a town that Rolph cel-

Figure 2.2. Mission Bank advertisements that ran in the Labor Clarion through the 1910s.

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ebrated. To understand how the Mission would develop culturally, economically, and physically through the twentieth century, it is important to understand the political context that enabled it to become a city within a city to begin with.

City Building, Progressive Reform, and the Improvement Club Movement In the 1880s, it was difficult for San Francisco’s city government to create infrastructure and amenities because politicians from all points in the political spectrum felt compelled to hold to a tax pledge, known as the Dollar Limit. This pledge stipulated that the city government would not collect more than one dollar on every one hundred dollars of assessed valuation; in other words, property tax rates were held to 1 percent. In this fiscal environment, the provision of public goods depended heavily upon private interests. This is one reason why neighborhoods began to organize, particularly along the urban fringes where many services had yet to reach. The solution for local homeowners and businesspeople, in San Francisco and around the country, was to form organizations called improvement clubs. The members of these clubs would often tax themselves to carry out physical improvements—new sidewalks, grading of streets, and so on— over small areas, sometimes just a couple of blocks.35 These improvements could be accomplished through municipally sanctioned special assessment districts (wherein property owners within a district would tax themselves to provide for local infrastructural improvements); in the case of smaller improvements, like the resurfacing of a boardwalk, the clubs could remain informal, taxing themselves without involving or even notifying any municipal agency.36 San Francisco’s first such organization, the Point Lobos Improvement Club, was formed in 1884. By 1890, there were around ten clubs.37 A number of these organizations were dedicated to the Mission, including the Sixteenth Street Improvement Club, a group composed of property owners in the surrounding area. Prominent members included Adolph Spreckels and George Center, a major Mission property owner and future supervisor.38 As with many improvement clubs, this organization was originally formed for the purpose of promoting a single project, in this case the extension of Sixteenth Street through the Mission Dolores cemetery.39 In 1889, after securing permission from the Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco to have “some 300 bodies” removed, and after convincing the Board of Supervisors to open a new street, the club members taxed themselves $1.50 per foot of

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their respective Sixteenth Street frontage to finance the project.40 Once the club had paid to lay the street out, it deeded the street to the municipality, with the understanding that the city would now assume responsibility for maintenance.41 Many of these single-issue clubs dissolved once their purpose was realized, but many others expanded their purpose. The Sixteenth Street Club was among the latter, and by 1891 it was lobbying the Board of Supervisors in connection with the Brannan Street sewer project. This campaign differed from the street extension in that the club was not itself offering to finance the project; it was asking the supervisors to appropriate municipal funds to complete the sewer. In June 1891 the club prevailed, and the supervisors appropriated $60,000 for the project. This appropriation set a new precedent in San Francisco fiscal politics, though no one seemed to have observed the fact.42 The appropriation had been made within the Dollar Limit, but this “was the first time a nongovernmental group had received a specifically appropriated request from the board of supervisors. Others had asked for and received funds from the board, but none had appeared at the annual tax-rate and expenditure allocation meeting to ensure that their funds would be included in the next year’s budget.”43 Though this precedent might not appear terribly important at first glance, it was significant for several reasons. In the nineteenth century, neighborhood residents who wanted improvements expected that they would have to shoulder at least a large proportion of the costs. This appropriation marked the moment when neighborhood-based interests developed a sustainable strategy for calling on all San Franciscans to finance improvements that were not an obvious benefit to the entire city. The decision also marked the moment when improvement clubs would begin to guide the municipality’s priorities for infrastructure planning. And while this appropriation was made within the Dollar Limit, “the improvement clubs were back the following year, this time from other parts of the city.”44 This was the first of many other such appropriations to come; collectively these commitments would make the Dollar Limit less and less tenable as the decade progressed.45 In 1891 the Sixteenth Street Improvement Club was an early and vocal advocate of overturning the limit.46 Other improvement clubs proliferated throughout the urban edges of San Francisco through the 1890s, adding their voices to the chorus calling for annual appropriations and for abandoning the Dollar Limit. These clubs became not only more numerous but also better organized, especially in the Mission. There was consider-

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able overlap among the leadership of these clubs: George Center was active in any number of Mission-based organizations, as was A. B. Maguire, who was also a future supervisor and eventually the commissioner of San Francisco’s Department of Public Works. In 1896, at least a dozen clubs—including the South Side Improvement Club, Holly Park and Mission Street Improvement Club, and the West End and Mission Road Improvement Club—banded together to form the Mission Improvement Union. Some of the local groups, like the Folsom Street Improvement Club, were dissolved and consolidated into the union; others, like the Sixteenth Street Club, joined the union while maintaining an independent organization; some other interested organizations, like the Noe Valley Defense Club, declined to join the union but pledged to cooperate with it.47 The union selected James D. Phelan—a prominent Mission resident who also happened to be the Democratic candidate for mayor—as its president. The union also selected Phelan as its delegate to the Charter Convention of August 1896, an important event not least because the proposed charter reform held out the possibility of increased appropriations for neighborhoods.48 For a variety of reasons, the Progressive-backed charter reform would fail on the 1896 ballot; but the Progressive Phelan prevailed, beginning a mayoralty that would last until 1902. Phelan tried charter reform again in 1898, and this time succeeded. Enacted in 1900, the new charter established a civil service, strengthened the role of the mayor, replaced many elected departmental offices with appointed ones, instituted at-large election of supervisors, allowed the city to take on more bonded debt, and provided for the eventual municipalization of urban services.49 Though the new charter did not overturn the Dollar Limit, Phelan did functionally neutralize it. One technique for accomplishing this was to steadily increase the assessed valuation of property in the city and to increase it by 72 percent in one year (1899).50 The city could continue to use only one dollar on every one hundred dollars of assessed valuation, but if the valuation were higher, then that 1 percent would be much larger in real terms. Moreover, the new charter explicitly exempted “parks, squares, grounds, and debt service from the limit,” and also provided mechanisms by which the limit could be suspended for major projects like a hospital. The supervisors proved all too willing to invoke those provisions that allowed them to suspend the limit.51 But even without breaking the limit, the city now had more leeway to take on bonded debt to finance projects. Freed from the need to raise their own money, in this new environment the improvement

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clubs became lobbying bodies, competing for public largesse that would be delivered in the form of sewer systems, parks, library branches, rail connections, paved streets, and other local improvements.52 Despite the fact that much more money was now available for nongovernmental groups, once in office Phelan and the improvement clubs often found themselves in conflict. Having encouraged the clubs to ask for appropriations, the mayor soon realized that the city could not accommodate every one of these requests. Also, the clubs had insisted that Phelan slash the salaries of government employees, which they considered crucial to the effective reform of city government. But Phelan refused to cut salaries as deeply as the clubs demanded.53 This appears to have been a classic case of a politician promising far more than he could have possibly delivered and alienating his base as a result.54 Yet there is no question that the Phelan era was very good for the “improvement club movement,” as it came to be known at the time. By the end his mayoralty, the Mission improvement clubs could claim major victories. In addition to countless smaller improvements, like paving and lighting, they secured a new high school at Eighteenth and Dolores Streets and had Folsom Street widened and replanted in the manner of a grand boulevard. The clubs were also behind the widening of Dolores Street, which included the planting of the street’s iconic palm trees, as well as the conversion of the Jewish Cemetery into Mission Park (today known as Dolores Park), though Dolores Street and the park were not finalized until after Phelan left office.55 All these improvements were conceived and promoted by the Mission clubs but financed by the city under the Phelan administration. In other words, the Mission improvement clubs were planning the southern half of San Francisco decades before the city had a planning commission. Though it was a very effective organization, the Mission Improvement Union does not appear to have been entirely stable. Phelan had resigned the presidency of the union when he was elected mayor, but otherwise the leadership remained consistent, with Center and Maguire still holding prominent positions. Still, only two years into its existence the union all but vanished from the improvement debates that played out in the press. In 1899, there was a “revival” of the group—which was renamed the “Federation of Mission Improvement Clubs”—for the purpose of lobbying for key improvements, including expanded sewer infrastructure, the repaving of Valencia Street, and the construction of Mission High School.56 Phelan vocally supported the new federation, as well as the Mission Union that he had once headed, in spite of the fact that he also clashed with them.57 But

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even with consistent leadership and the support of city hall, the organization receded again soon after this revival, judging by the volume of coverage in the local press. Perhaps this instability is not surprising, considering that the city’s improvement club movement was still nascent, its first club having been formed scarcely ten years earlier. Yet in spite of its instability, the Mission Union was enough of a success to inspire a citywide federation of improvement clubs, a group that would later become the Civic League of Improvement Clubs. The Call reported that since “the Mission district made its existence known to the outside world through its improvement clubs, streets heretofore only known to the City at large on the official map have loomed into actual reality and [clubs from around the city] are beginning to ask through their residents a share of attention and a division of the distribution of the expenditure of the public funds for improvements.”58 The Mission was the model. Mayor Phelan decided not to seek reelection in 1901, partly because of the rancor that had developed between himself and his improvement club allies, but he would not likely have won reelection even if he had run. A fateful decision during the City Front strike of 1901 all but ensured this outcome. In February of that year, the Teamsters, longshoremen, and the Sailor’s Union had banded together to form the City Front Federation. Only a few months later, the Teamsters would refuse to carry baggage that had been handled by a non-union drayage company. A lockout followed, and soon the City Front “voted to shut down the waterfront.”59 When the City Front unions struck, a massive sympathy strike ensued. In retrospect, Phelan’s big mistake was allowing San Francisco police to escort non-union wagon drivers and private guards, a decision that alienated his labor allies, aroused public sympathy for the strikers (five of whom were killed), and was widely viewed as a costly miscalculation by the business community.60 In September 1901, with the strike still under way and mayoral elections around the corner, an attorney and political entrepreneur named Abraham Ruef saw an opportunity. Shrewdly cultivating the widespread support for the strikers, Ruef moved to create a new party—the Union Labor Party (ULP)—which nominated an orchestra conductor named Eugene Schmitz as its candidate for mayor. Schmitz rode the public sympathy for labor into city hall and would win two more elections in 1903 and 1905. Though many expected a radical break from politics as usual, in fact the ULP carried on very much in the Progressive tradition of the Phelan administration and remained responsive to the growing improvement club movement.61

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With one eye on the door, Phelan had founded the Association for the Improvement and Adornment of San Francisco in 1901, with the idea of remaining involved in questions about the city’s future after he would leave office in early 1902. The association’s first and signal act was to invite the architect Daniel Burnham to make a plan for the city. Phelan had met Burnham at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago: Burnham had served as the director of works for the Expo, while Phelan had served as the vice president of California’s delegation. Phelan was so impressed by the White City that thereafter he had imagined San Francisco in its light.62 Burnham accepted the invitation and moved into a cottage on Twin Peaks, from where he could look down and see San Francisco in plan. The Chicago architect presented his iconic scheme to the San Francisco supervisors in September 1905, but the associated publication would not appear until later that year, less than six months before the disaster of April 1906. The timing was remarkable. Phelan had addressed the influential Commonwealth Club about the plan on March 14, just three weeks before the disaster, which meant that the inspiring vision was fresh in the minds of the city’s elite.63 The coincidence of these events would set the stage for a public battle, one that would remake the political geography of San Francisco.

Disaster, Visionary Planning, and the Rise of the Mission Promotion Association “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized.” Daniel Burnham is widely known by this epigram, and his 1905 plan for San Francisco embodied the spirit of the exhortation.64 The plan was very big, and it certainly stirred men’s blood. Modeled on Baron Haussmann’s revisions to Paris under Napoleon III, Burnham’s scheme proposed radical revisions to the city’s existing physical fabric. It placed neoclassical monuments in new parks atop each of the city’s seven major hills; it created one sprawling park that extended from Twin Peaks to Lake Merced, in the southwest corner of the city; it extended the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park east to Van Ness Avenue and Market Street, where there was to rise a grand civic center; it introduced at least ten new parkways and cut dozens of new boulevards through the dense grids of San Francisco. (See fig. 2.3.) The Mission would have hosted two new parks, one parkway, one arcade, eight boulevards, and a new rail station, all of which would have required the partial or wholesale clearance of hundreds of individual blocks.

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Figure 2.3. Burnham’s proposed Haussmanian revisions to San Francisco. Daniel H. Burnham, Report on a Plan for San Francisco (San Francisco: Sunset Press, 1905).

Looking at the two largest boulevards, along with the treatment of Dolores Street and Potrero Boulevard, it was clear that Burnham saw the valley of the Mission District as the main route to the peninsula to the south of the city. It was also clear that the neighborhood was not just to be traversed, but aggrandized. The “Mission Arcade” would have extended from Fourteenth Street in the north, to the foot of Bernal Hill in the south; and from Mission Street to the west, and Howard Street to the east. As Burnham described it, he “intended to exclude wheel traffic from Capp Street [which ran parallel between Mission and Howard], to arcade it on both sides, and to face upon it fine shops that will extend through to Mission street on one side and to Howard on the other. It will also be widened and planted

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as a parkway.”65 The widening of Capp would have resulted in a narrowing of the blocks that extended through to Mission and Howard, leaving them about half of their original size. As Mission Street was already the economic spine of the neighborhood, this move in particular would have been radically disruptive to the physical and social fabric in which Rolph and company were so invested. All across the city, the plan would have required the condemnation of thousands upon thousands of lots. Willis Polk, one of San Francisco’s most prominent architects and influential voices in planning matters, viewed Burnham’s scheme the same way that post–World War II planners would view a master plan: it was a long-term vision for the city’s future, the realization of which would require “a central directing power.”66 Without a Napoleon to simply decree that the condemnations proceed, the municipality would need to radically expand its powers of eminent domain. Not even Phelan was optimistic that such a change would have been possible in the current climate, and so prominent citizens and policy makers received the document more as an inspiring vision for the future than as a description of a feasible plan for the present. But the earthquake changed the climate. This was true not only in and around city hall but also in the Mission, where residents came away with a set of lessons and ambitions that differed sharply from those of the Burnham plan’s proponents. When disaster struck on April 18, 1906, Rolph and his close associates were, in the eyes of residents, the Mission’s leading citizens. They were also at the center of an institutional network that had resources to distribute to the needy and the capacity to secure and distribute outside aid. On April 20 Rolph, Sullivan, and more than a dozen of the neighborhood’s businessmen and church leaders convened a meeting in the barn behind Rolph’s house, on San Jose Avenue at Twenty-Fifth Street, almost a mile south of the fire line.67 The group formed the Mission Relief Association, and for weeks it distributed aid to the victims who lined up outside Rolph’s barn. (See fig. 2.4.) There are accounts of the association and their members using their influence to obtain cots, blankets, and other provisions from disorganized city agencies.68 In the weeks that followed, tens of thousands of people were fed out of Rolph’s barn, more than any other relief effort in San Francisco.69 It was the Mission Relief Association’s successor organization—the Mission Promotion Association—that dedicated the city’s first “refugee cottage,” at Nineteenth and Dolores Streets, on September 11, 1906.70 While Mission residents largely viewed the response of city government as incompetent, Rolph and company were regarded as neighborhood heroes. When Rolph was later asked who had given him

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Figure 2.4. Long lines outside the Mission Relief Association headquarters, spring 1906. Courtesy of California Historical Society, CHS2013.1280.

and his associates the “authority to organize and govern the Mission during the panic days,” Rolph replied, “Nobody gave us authority. We took it.”71 The leaders of the Mission would soon prove that they were in no hurry to give up the authority that they had taken. In the wake of the disaster, residents of the neighborhood felt a new sense of pride in their identities as Missionites. At the same time, however, the tragedy had undeniably inspired a new sense of civic unity across the entire city. If ever there was a moment when all San Franciscans would sign on to a citywide plan, this was it. The hard realities of lot lines and longstanding buildings had made the Burnham plan seem an inspirational fantasy, but that existing physical fabric had been largely erased by seismic waves and fire. Phelan and other Progressive businesspeople saw a blank slate, as did most factions of the labor movement and Schmitz’s Union Labor administration.72 City hall moved aggressively to make the dream of the City Beautiful a reality, creating the Committee on Reconstruction on which both Schmitz and Phelan served. Paradoxically, the fate of Phelan’s dream would end up in the hands of Phelan’s main political opponent, Abe Ruef, who also served on the committee. Understanding that San Fran-

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cisco would need to centralize planning authority if it hoped to carry out even part of the Burnham plan, and understanding that the state constitution largely insulated private utility companies from municipal planning efforts, Ruef quickly drafted a constitutional amendment that would have expanded the city’s powers of eminent domain and given the municipality the right to reroute the pipes and rails of the utilities, for a period of two years.73 This proposed legislation—which bore the fate of the Burnham plan on its shoulders—became known as the Ruef amendment. In order to understand the debate over this amendment, it is important to understand more about Ruef and San Francisco’s history with political machines. Ruef was the driving force behind the ULP, and the friend and mentor of Mayor Schmitz. He described himself as a “boss,” and his enemies were happy to describe him that way, too. The conservative Michael de Young, outspoken publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle, was chief among these enemies, and his paper regularly printed articles with titles like “Boss Ruef Will Organize His Followers on Tammany Lines: Abe Ruef Plans a Tammany Hall of His Own.”74 Some of the now-classic works of San Francisco history uncritically adopted this narrative. However, more recent work has shown that Ruef is much better understood as a corrupt “impresario” than a boss. Though he was undoubtedly in the habit of paying and accepting bribes, he had no geographic or ethnic base of support, and no control over the ULP. The influence Ruef exerted was rooted in his personal relationship with Schmitz.75 The ULP supervisors did not follow Ruef or feel themselves beholden to him.76 His network of small contractors and minor union officials was “too ad hoc and thinly rooted to call it a ‘machine.’”77 In other words, Ruef had no machine to be the boss of. That he referred to himself as a boss was more braggadocio than reality. Careful analysis of the Ruef amendment leaves little doubt that it was the only vehicle through which any version of the Burnham plan might have been accomplished. Moreover, in its final version the amendment was relatively free of opportunities for graft.78 Even so, the fact that the legislation centralizing authority bore Ruef’s name would serve as an impediment to its passage. The plan faced other impediments, too. It was opposed by laissez-faire business factions, led by de Young, who on principle also opposed the closed-shop and the campaign to municipalize the city’s water and streetcar services. De Young and company had no interest in expanding any governmental power over private property, particularly when that government was controlled by “Boss Ruef”—or, for that matter, by a scrupulously honest labor administration.79 Neighborhood groups also opposed the plan, and the most influential

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of these voices came from the Mission District. In fact, the role of the neighborhoods in defeating the Ruef amendment has been vastly underemphasized.80 The amendment appears to have been the original impetus for the leaders of the Mission Relief Association to form a new, more durable organization. The name “Mission Promotion Association” first appeared in print on June 6, 1906, in the Call and the Chronicle, both of which reprinted a “Memorial” that the association presented to the California State Legislature.81 The document was signed by the “executive committee of the Mission Promotion Association,” which included many old regulars from Mission-based improvement clubs—D. O. Crowley, George Center, and A.  B. Maguire among them—but that also included some newer names: James Rolph and Matt Sullivan, the leaders of the Mission Bank, Mission Savings Bank, and the Mission Relief Association.82 The MPA chose Sullivan, a skilled attorney, to present the memorial to the legislature in person. The document opposed the Ruef amendment, which Sullivan referred to as “this very vicious legislation,” on many grounds.83 It argued that the amendment would extend the franchise of the United Railroads, thereby interfering with the planned municipalization of the transportation system. It also argued that San Francisco had other priorities that should take precedence, principally securing the city’s water supply, but also reconstructing schools and public buildings. But the MPA’s chief objection was that, as Sullivan figured, a cost “of between $30 and $40 million would have to be incurred, and all of the taxpayers of San Francisco would have to bear this burden, while the benefits would be reaped principally by the property owners in the northeastern [downtown] part of the city.”84 If it was primarily downtown that would see increased property values, the reasoning went, then residents and businesses in that area should tax themselves to carry out the improvements. On June 7, the Assembly Committee on Constitutional Amendments held a meeting for the purpose of hearing the MPA’s objections. Over the following days, the assembly hearings on the amendment essentially became a public debate between Ruef and Sullivan, with the former conceding many of the latter’s points. In addition to advancing all of the arguments from the memorial, Sullivan also asked why the entire state should be making decisions that only San Francisco would have to live with. A revised version of the amendment emerged from committee, but not before the MPA had ensured that the entire enterprise would receive some very bad press. It is impossible to know whether the MPA and its conservative business allies would have won the public debate over the Ruef amendment, because another conflict emerged among the backers of the Burnham plan—a con-

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flict that would secure the fate of the measure. In the summer of 1906, a small group of Progressive reformers—including Phelan, Rudolph Spreckels, and San Francisco Bulletin editor Fremont Older—mounted a graft investigation into the Schmitz administration. Evidence of corruption soon came to light. Ruef had apparently accepted a number of small bribes and two very large ones. In order to “help” them sell their operations to the city, the United Railroads paid Ruef $200,000, while the Bay Cities Water Company paid him $1 million.85 Ironically, Ruef had negotiated the largest bribes in pursuit of one of Phelan’s main ambitions: to municipalize the city’s streetcar and water utilities. So whatever Phelan’s and Schmitz’s many shared aims for San Francisco, their governing methods (and no doubt old grudges and personality conflicts) would not be reconciled. Amid the scandal, the Ruef amendment became hopelessly suspect and was badly defeated at the polls in November 1906.86 Phelan had won a political battle, but at the cost of his own civic vision. The city would be rebuilt along existing property lines, and Schmitz would be removed from office. He was replaced with a Progressive lawyer named Edward Robeson Taylor, who appointed both Matt Sullivan and George Center to the Board of Supervisors.87 Ruef was tried, and when the original prosecution team left in 1908, Sullivan and his law partner Hiram Johnson, future governor of California, stepped in.88 Though Ruef only served four years of his fourteen-year sentence, his political career was over. Before the graft investigation came to light, the idea of the public interest had furnished the conceptual terrain on which the battle over reconstruction was fought. According to the Committee on Reconstruction, on which both Phelan and Schmitz served, all San Franciscans would benefit from the improvements of the Burnham plan, so all San Franciscans should bear a portion of the cost.89 Invoking a spirit of “public duty,” proponents of the plan called on property owners to be amenable to condemnation proceedings, and they called on all citizens to be amenable to increased taxation and debt.90 In Phelan and Schmitz’s conception, all of the taxpayers in San Francisco constituted a discrete public, and they implicitly rejected the idea that the city contained multiple publics representing multiple interests and points of view. De Young and the conservative business faction essentially agreed that there was a public at the scale of the entire city, and they believed that the public interest was best served by respecting private property rights. The leadership of the MPA also spoke about San Francisco as a unified public, but it profoundly undermined that vision at the same time.

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For Sullivan and the Mission residents he represented, the Burnham plan would not serve the public interest; rather, it would serve the special interest of downtown property owners and corporations (a category that would include de Young).91 While Phelan and the Committee on Reconstruction projected a civic whole, Sullivan and the Mission faction drew sharp lines between their own interests and the interests of downtown, constituting a public at the smaller scale of the neighborhood. If, in this view, downtown interests wanted improvements that would enhance their own property values, then they should establish a special assessment district—a mechanism that by its very nature legitimized the view that there were multiple publics, constituted at geographical scales much smaller than that of an entire city. In the years that followed, Sullivan and the MPA would routinely be charged with benefiting from citywide largesse. But for now the MPA’s argument—that one geographical section should not be made to subsidize improvements in another—had won a rather ragged victory. Having prevailed at the ballot box, property owners and businesspeople of the Mission had helped curtail the authority of city hall and the Board of Supervisors to determine how the neighborhood would be rebuilt. In so doing, they created a power vacuum. If the city wasn’t going to determine how the neighborhood would be rebuilt, then who would? Rolph, Sullivan, and their allies answered very clearly: the MPA. Before moving to a discussion about the trajectory of the MPA, it is useful to reflect, for a moment, on the grand scheme that it helped to defeat. What does the fate of Burnham’s plan for San Francisco tell us about the political culture of early twentieth-century American cities?

To Centralize? Burnham by the Bay, Burnham by the Lake It is beyond the scope of this book to undertake a comprehensive comparison of Burnham’s 1905 plan for San Francisco and his more successful 1909 Plan of Chicago, but some basic observations can tell us much about planning power in the United States. Why did this City Beautiful vision prevail in one city but not in the other? Before answering that question, it is important to dispel a myth. Living in twenty-first-century San Francisco, one occasionally hears that the Civic Center is the one piece of Burnham’s plan that was implemented, a claim that finds at least some support in the literature.92 But in fact that aspect of the plan, too, was entirely rejected in San Francisco. In 1909, a revised version of Burnham’s center was endorsed by the supervisors and promoted by Burnham himself. But the $8 million bond issue was defeated by the voters.93 In 1912, the supervisors approved

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a plan for a civic center on a different site, three blocks away, with an entirely different architectural scheme. None of the participants in or observers of these debates understood the new plan to be even a modified version of Burnham’s idea. In fact, it was a marked departure, since Burnham had planned his civic center on the site of the existing city hall. Covering the meeting in which the supervisors unanimously approved the new plan, the Chronicle reported on the lone voice of dissent as follows: “Willis Polk Sings Swan Song of Burnham Plan for Center at Van Ness Avenue.”94 As of 1912, the plan was rejected in its entirety. Chicago provides a clear contrast. Burnham’s plan for that city contained the same basic ideas about urbanism—the plan called for expanded parks and widened streets; it proposed new boulevards and a ring road; it would have reclaimed the waterfront with recreation space, opened new rail stations, and placed a grand new civic center just to the west of the Loop. Like the plan for San Francisco, all of these ideas were rendered in a Haussmann-inspired Beaux-Arts idiom. As in San Francisco, Burnham’s Chicago civic center was not realized in any form at all. Unlike San Francisco, however, Chicago embraced other aspects of the plan, and even acted on a number of the visionary proposals. Wacker Drive, Grant Park, Navy Pier, and a widened Michigan Avenue are only a few of the most spectacular elements of the plan that were realized, even though some were realized in modified form.95 For all of its similarities to the San Francisco plan, the Chicago plan differed in some key respects. The latter was much more attentive to the existing physical, social, and economic fabric of the city. Nowhere was this clearer than in the treatment of the financial centers of the respective cities. In San Francisco, the financial district was mentioned in only a handful of passages. In spite of the howls of the MPA and other opponents, the physical improvements that Burnham proposed for downtown San Francisco were modest in comparison with those he proposed for the Civic Center, and even for the Mission. With the exception of one boulevard and a grand place at the Ferry Building, downtown was ignored. In the Plan of Chicago, by contrast, an entire chapter was devoted to the financial center of the city, and many other chapters—like “Streets” and “Transportation”—were largely devoted to solving problems inside the Loop. It is fair to say that the Plan of Chicago concerned itself first and foremost with the business district, addressing problems like warehousing, rail connections, slum clearance, provision of marketplaces, relocation of the port, and more.96 This focus is not surprising when one considers that the Chicago Plan was commissioned by the Merchants Club, which later merged with the

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Commercial Club, both of which were “exclusive brotherhoods of elite businessmen and professionals” whose interests were deeply rooted in the business district.97 The Association for the Improvement and Adornment of San Francisco, which brought Burnham to the West Coast, cannot be seen as equivalent to Chicago’s Commercial Club. Though the former claimed the membership of many prominent businessmen, most notably its founder James Phelan, the major commercial interests in the Financial District were not, by and large, members. Its profile was largely that of a wealthy Progressive reform group or an association of patrons of the arts. Though specific aspects of the Chicago Plan might be opposed by a major concern, like Montgomery Ward, the business community was remarkably unified in comparison to San Francisco, where the business community was riven into conservative and progressive camps by disagreements over the “labor question,” municipalization of services, tax rates, and a number of other issues.98 Much of the success of the Chicago Plan might be attributed to an extraordinary public relations campaign.99 The Report on a Plan for San Francisco was a beautifully illustrated volume, but the Plan of Chicago book was sumptuous by comparison, featuring full-color reproductions of paintings by Jules Guérin. The printed volume was only one piece of the Commercial Club’s larger media campaign that included slide shows, public lectures, and extensive cultivation of the local press. The plan was even adapted into a textbook for Chicago eighth-graders.100 San Francisco boosters had dreamed of getting their Burnham plan into the local school curriculum, but they were unsuccessful.101 Crucial though the marketing campaign was, the institutional story seems to provide the most satisfying explanation of why Burnham’s dream was largely realized in Chicago. After the Commercial Club presented the plan to the city, it recommended that Mayor Fred Busse appoint a commission that would be charged with implementing the plan. Busse complied, creating the Chicago Plan Commission, a semi-official body that would refine aspects of the individual projects and shepherd them through the legislative process over the course of decades. The commission claimed a membership of 328, but in fact the fifteen-person executive committee constituted the real decision-making core. Twelve of those fifteen committee members were prominent in the Commercial Club.102 San Francisco also had a mayoral-appointed body that was charged with implementing its own Burnham plan: the Committee on Reconstruction, also known as the Committee of Forty. But the most prominent of the those forty members, Phelan, was mounting a graft trial of the next-most prominent mem-

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ber, Ruef, as well as of the mayor who had appointed him to begin with. The Committee of Forty dissolved almost as quickly as it was formed. Why did Burnham’s vision prevail in Chicago, but not San Francisco? The simplest way to answer this question is to observe that the Chicago plan was the better of the two. It was more detailed, more realistic, and more attentive to the interest groups that wielded decisive influence. Yet even the best plan would not likely have prevailed in San Francisco, because the business and governance contexts were not conducive. Chicago’s Commercial Club benefited from a remarkable degree of unity and easy access to the municipal government. This meant that neighborhood resistance would meet a unified front. For example, Alderman John Brennan, representing the Near West Side neighborhoods of the eighteenth ward, voted against a street widening because his working-class constituents would be made to shoulder some of the costs of the improvement.103 In response, the Plan Commission courted the vote of Alderman Powers from the nineteenth ward, kept up the pressure on the rest of the council, and soon succeeded in moving the project forward through city government. The picture was completely different in San Francisco, where the business community was deeply divided, and where the municipal government was in turmoil over graft investigations and frequent turnovers of power. In this context, and unlike in Chicago, neighborhood resistance could gain real traction. It was the MPA that most effectively capitalized on this civic disarray.

Conclusion In the 1890s the Mission District was an economically diverse, though largely elite San Francisco suburb. Residents of the neighborhood took much pride in being Missionites, and they viewed themselves as constituting a coherent public, one that stood apart from the larger city. Boosters like James Rolph and Matt Sullivan not only partook of this pride but also cultivated it and capitalized on it, creating local banking institutions that thrived throughout the entire southern half of San Francisco. Rolph, Sullivan, and their associates were motivated by a desire to see the Mission become a city within a city. An older generation of Mission boosters had already modeled one strategy by which Rolph and Sullivan might accomplish this aim: lobby for public largesse under the auspices of an improvement club. The Mission had already been a key player, in the 1890s, in bringing about a new fiscal and planning environment in San Francisco. Progres-

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sive Era charter reform had instituted at-large elections, which meant that supervisors were less directly accountable to the voters of their districts. And yet this period saw an expansion of neighborhood power through the work of improvement clubs that were given annual appropriations to pursue their local planning agendas. The Sixteenth Street Improvement Club was the first to receive an appropriation from the Board of Supervisors, and the Mission Improvement Union was the first association of improvement clubs. This organization would inspire a succession of citywide improvement club associations, culminating in the Civic League, an organization that wielded much influence in San Francisco planning and politics, though it would never rival the MPA. The MPA was in some respects a continuation of the Mission Improvement Union, and the Federation of Mission Improvement Clubs, but it would prove a much more durable and influential organization. Founded by Rolph and Sullivan in response to Burnham’s proposal, the MPA’s first accomplishment would be to prevent the implementation of the visionary plan. The MPA also thereby helped to assure that the very power to plan would not be concentrated in the municipal government but rather be dispersed among the neighborhoods. Comparing the fate of San Francisco’s Burnham plan to that of Chicago, one can take away some very simple lessons: a well-organized interest group is a powerful one. Chicago’s Commercial Club was organized, and San Francisco’s business community was fractious. Chicago’s Commercial Club also enjoyed direct access to city government and effectively ran a quasi-public planning body, the Chicago Plan Commission. San Francisco’s city government was a battleground for business, labor, and Progressive factions, none of which were firmly in control. While these groups fought among themselves, the humble improvement clubs quietly captured more and more municipal resources, and gained more and more real influence. In Chicago, business interests easily overcame neighborhood interests. Not so in Progressive Era San Francisco, where power was up for grabs, and where one neighborhood in particular would come to dominate the planning agenda for fully half the geographic area of the city.

THREE

Neighborhood Capitalism: Urban Planning, Municipal Government, and the Mission Promotion Association Power was up for grabs in early twentieth-century San Francisco. Between 1900 and 1912, no political coalition could hold on to city hall for long, and in the wake of the defeat of the Burnham plan, there was no centralized authority to impose comprehensive urban planning. The Mission Promotion Association (MPA) would capitalize on this circumstance, establishing itself as a de facto planning authority not only within the boundaries of the Mission District, as most people thought of them at the time, but in the entire southern half of San Francisco. In the years following the disaster, the city’s major labor councils—the Building Trades Council (BTC) and the San Francisco Labor Council (SFLC)—moved to the Mission, having been burned out of the South of Market. The Mission’s existing political coalition broadened its base by incorporating the unions, further strengthening its hand in the interdistrict contest for municipal investment in parks, roads, libraries, and other improvements. What makes the MPA most notable in the history of urban America is the extent of its influence. Even though its planning power was rooted in its status as a representative of a specific neighborhood, the association would exercise that power not just within the loose boundaries of the Mission, and not just in southern San Francisco, but also in the California state legislature and with the association that governed insurance rates for the entire western United States. As the MPA gained stature in San Francisco civic life, the self-described Progressive businessmen at the heart of the association ascended to political office. So successful was the association in securing municipal largesse for the neighborhood that its supporters began to describe it as “the Parliament of San Francisco,” while its critics began to describe the leadership of the Mission District almost as a Progressive political machine.

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Historians have long understood that the political economies of Progressive Era cities were contested. Municipal reformers combated not only machines but also powerful groups representing the interests of industrial capital, finance, insurance, and real estate. Regimes of those sorts were certainly active in San Francisco, yet the political economy of the city was such that another type of regime needs to be described. At least in the emerging arena of urban planning, a kind of neighborhood capitalism also thrived in San Francisco. Here was a regime organized entirely around boosting real estate values, nurturing commercial interests, and securing infrastructural improvements, all for specific neighborhoods. Where the interests of industrialists, financiers, insurers, and real estate investors coincided with those of the neighborhood, coalitions could form; where their interests conflicted with those of the neighborhood, a fight would ensue. In other words, neighborhood first. While the improvement club movement can usefully be described as a lobby, or a set of interest groups, it was something more than that, too. The improvement club movement not only lobbied for infrastructural investment, it also represented a broad coalition that advanced a specific set of ideas about how to organize the city’s economy. Not only was the MPA the most powerful representative of this neighborhood capitalism, it can also be understood as a proto-planning authority. In an era when questions of service delivery, transportation, and infrastructure were treated as discrete concerns, the MPA distinguished itself as perhaps the first body in San Francisco to effectively argue that road maintenance was connected to the port, which was connected to parks, parks to schools, schools to public buildings, buildings to insurance rates, and insurance rates to economic development. When San Francisco finally did establish a planning commission in 1917, the MPA was at the heart of the effort, and it supplied the early leadership of the commission. Many have suggested that after the disaster of 1906, San Francisco’s growth was unplanned; this chapter will show that it was anything but.

Understanding the Mission Promotion Association Improvement clubs had been active in San Francisco as early as 1884, and in the 1890s they collectively changed how the city planned and financed improvements. The clubs were not new in 1906, but that year did mark a significant change, one that the Call summarized well: The great fire of 1906 is responsible for the formation of most of the improvement clubs. The fire drove people into the outskirts of the city. The lack

60 / Chapter Three of street work, sewer work and lights caused them to band together into improvement bodies. The rehabilitation of the burned district likewise required organized effort. Other portions of the city that had formerly been residence sections were transformed into business centers. To perfect this change the merchants and property owners formed improvement clubs. Civic organizations sprang up or were resuscitated in every section of the city.1

The improvement club movement intensified all over San Francisco, but nowhere were the changes more pronounced than in the Mission. The Federation of Mission Improvement Clubs had done much to guide the physical development of the neighborhood. Judging by press coverage, the federation was most active around the turn of the century, but its influence seems to have waned by 1905.2 When the MPA declared its existence in 1906, it was in some respects the latest revival of the old Mission Improvement Union; indeed the membership of the MPA’s board was almost identical to that of the Mission Federation, and the new association carried on the practice of lobbying the supervisors for annual appropriations. However, the MPA differed in key respects from its predecessors. First, the MPA had new blood—it was founded and led by Rolph, who served as its president, and by Sullivan, who served in a variety of different positions. Like the federation, the MPA pursued annual appropriations from the supervisors, but the new organization was much more consistently successful in this endeavor than the federation had been. The MPA would also prove to be more durable and more influential. One likely explanation for the strength of the MPA was that it was much more formally organized than its predecessors had been. Unlike many of the smaller improvement clubs, the MPA had its own bylaws and staff structure. It had not only a president, vice president, secretary, treasurer, and “sergeant at arms,” but also an engineer who drafted and promoted plans.3 The association had thirteen standing committees, many of which were devoted to physical planning issues, including park and playground space, streets, sewers, public transportation, lighting, water supply, and a school and other public buildings.4 It was a membership organization, with monthly dues of one dollar (equivalent to about twenty-five dollars in 2015). Any individual, civic group, business, or other body could apply for membership, provided three current members sponsored the application. Each individual or collective member had one vote, although polls were typically well orchestrated and unanimous. In 1908, the MPA built its own hall, on Valencia, near Sixteenth Street. The hall soon became an important public forum, not unlike the Commonwealth Club, where various

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experts would deliver lectures on matters of general interest to the public, and where politicians and other influential figures would float and debate policy initiatives. In some respects the MPA was a typical improvement club. Its bylaws state that the principal objective was “to unite, and keep united, the residents and taxpayers of the Mission District for their material, social, and moral advancement.”5 We might take this statement as a central tenet of neighborhood capitalism. This kind of declaration was common enough among improvement clubs, yet the MPA was distinguished by both the complexity of its structure and by the extent and strength of its institutional connections. The MPA’s mission statement tracked closely to those of the Mission Bank and the Mission Savings Bank, which were also founded by Rolph and Sullivan. The Savings Bank advertised that “practically all the loans of this bank have been made on Mission property, thereby keeping the money in this community for its advancement.”6 In order to advance the Mission community, the MPA focused on attracting business, pressuring service providers, and securing favorable legislation at the city and state levels. It also focused on providing physical improvements—new schools, roads, recreation space, rail connections, gas and water infrastructure, and expanded harbor facilities. While the MPA lobbied the local and state government, the closely aligned banks financed the real estate market and the commercial geography of the neighborhood. The leadership of the MPA led not only a campaign for improvement but also a coordinated effort to cultivate and capture local markets in real estate, retail, services, and finance: if people never needed to leave the neighborhood for goods and services, then their capital would not leave either. As Rolph often made clear, his aim was to make the Mission self-sufficient, a city within a city. These efforts were undergirded not only by alliances with the local business and banking community, which one might expect from an improvement club, but also by a less predictable set of alliances with labor. To fully appreciate the significance of the MPA’s coalition with the local unions, it is important to understand that in the first two decades of the twentieth century, labor was more powerful in San Francisco than it was in any other American city. There are a variety of factors that explain this relative strength, including the city’s isolation. As one historian put it, the fact that “an abundant supply of ‘cheap labor’ could only be found across the earth’s largest ocean demonstrates the advantage that geography gave to San Francisco unionism.”7 Any employer that wished to bring in strikebreakers would have a much harder time finding them than would a comparable employer in a northeastern industrial city.

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Union Labor Party (ULP) administrations occupied city hall from 1902 to 1907 and from 1910 to 1912. Even when labor administrations were not in power, “mayors and boards of supervisors either genuinely sympathized with labor’s agenda or voted for it because they feared the potential wrath of voters in the South of Market area and Mission District.”8 From the 1901 debacle in which Phelan allowed police to escort strikebreakers until World War I, the prevailing wisdom among all but the most conservative business interests was that nothing was to be gained through open-shop campaigns and direct confrontation with the unions. The citizenry at large quickly wearied of graft prosecutions of ULP politicians largely because of the damage they did to the city’s reputation in the larger nation.9 The city’s two most prominent labor organizations—the BTC and the SFLC—moved from the South of Market to the Mission in the years following the fire, the SFLC in 1907 and the BTC in 1908. The combined membership of these organizations was at least forty thousand.10 Both built temples in the neighborhood, only a few blocks from each other, and both published newspapers out of those temples. These organizations represented dozens of smaller unions around San Francisco, but the Mission hosted the largest concentration of unions in the city. For the week of July 10, 1914, the Labor Clarion (published by the SFLC) listed close to sixty meetings, all for different unions, in the Mission: twenty-seven meetings were to be held in the Building Trades Temple, and at least twenty were to be held in different spaces in the neighborhood, mostly storefront union halls. Such halls were ubiquitous in the northwestern section of the Mission. Labor leaders understood that their interests were served by publicizing their coalition with business, and when it came to the subject of physical improvements, labor sounded every bit the part of the booster. The March 23, 1909, headline for Organized Labor (the BTC’s paper) was typical: “Buy School Bonds: Building Trades Council Recommends Purchase as a Safe Investment and Patriotic Duty.”11 A few weeks later, another article titled “Provide for Schools and Streets” announced that the “community that does not take proper care of its children is committing civic suicide . . . and the person who raises any obstacle against the rehabilitation of the schools and streets is not a true friend of San Francisco.”12 Both Organized Labor and Labor Clarion regularly featured articles supporting not only bond issues but also municipalization of water and rails, and sharp critiques of “the vacant lot industry” wherein speculators would hold on to vacant lots, waiting for the land values to spike. In 1916 Robert Roos, the president of the Civic League, wrote that “from the business man’s standpoint the Improvement Associations are

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a business proposition  .  .  . they help to make streets more passable and to improve his property, they bring him light, water, fire and police protection and enhance the value of his neighborhood, in direct proportion to the amount of their efficient work.”13 But while he acknowledged that improvement was a business proposition, he also observed that improvement “is the one spot in our civic life where capital and labor do meet on the same footing and join hands for the betterment of their neighborhood.”14 The suggestion that capital and labor ever met on equal footing was exaggeration—even when in city hall, the most labor could accomplish was to advance the Progressive business community’s agenda in a closed-shop environment. But Roos was not wrong in asserting that improvement was the one area that could bring together groups that tended to be mutually antagonistic.15 A similar circumstance prevailed in Progressive Era Boston, where the “powerful idea” of improvement “acted within the neighborhood of Jamaica Plain as a force for unity. Although middleclass in outlook, improvement tended not to be sectarian. Instead it was a neighborhood booster ethos open to all who were interested in growth, respectability, and real estate values.”16 Improvement meant better jobs, schools, transportation, and a better living environment in general. No civic group in the city was more effective than the MPA at promoting these middle-class values to the working class—particularly to the more culturally conservative building trades workers, so many of whom resided in the Mission. That meant that no civic group in the city was more effective at forging alliances with organized labor. But it was not just the MPA’s campaign for improvement that enabled it to win the support of labor. According to the Call, “It was the Mission Promotion association that first began the agitation upon behalf of home industry.”17 The home industry movement might be described as a campaign of import substitution, to borrow terminology from international development. In order to promote economic growth, San Francisco should itself begin to produce the things that it currently imported, particularly manufactured goods that it imported from the East Coast. With a growing industrial district in the northeast of the Mission, the MPA had every reason to support home industry, while the unions saw good jobs. The BTC and the SFLC collaborated with the MPA on legislative campaigns to protect California industry from eastern manufacturers. By all accounts, this campaign was quite successful.18 The MPA also developed a number of cultural strategies for cultivating labor that will be explained in more depth in the following chapter. The MPA was uncommonly enterprising and well connected, but what

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Figure 3.1. Mission District boundaries as most San Franciscans understood them (smaller shaded area) contrasted with MPA’s claimed jurisdiction, or “Mission District proper” (larger shaded area). Map by Blake Swanson.

made the association unique, at least in the context of San Francisco’s improvement club movement, was the scope of its political ambition and geographic influence. In figure 3.1, the smaller highlighted area indicates roughly the boundaries of the neighborhood as it was defined in many municipal documents and real estate advertisements.19 But the MPA claimed jurisdiction over an area much larger than the Mission: the larger highlighted area in figure 3.1 indicates the boundaries of the neighborhood as the MPA defined it, street by street, in its bylaws. This, according to the MPA, was “the Mission District proper”—an area that contained forty thousand homes and 55 percent of the city’s population by 1909.20 The association was almost as active and effective in this broader area as it was within the more commonly accepted, narrower boundaries of the Mission. In 1909, for example, the MPA appeared “before the Board of Supervisors to ask that the property known as the House of Refuge lot, at the junction of Ocean and San Jose Avenues, consisting of 100 acres, now under a nominal rental as a vegetable garden be set aside for the purpose of a city park.”21 By 1915, this space would become Balboa Park, second in size only to Golden Gate Park.22 The MPA was also responsible for preserving the slopes of Twin Peaks as parkland.23 In 1912 alone the MPA pushed through road improvements in the southern half of San Francisco totaling half a million dollars’ worth of work—“improvements [that] have been provided for through the demands of the Mission Promotion Association.”24

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The outlying districts, where much of this work was done, were brandnew and almost entirely residential. Residents and businesses in these areas had much to gain from an affiliation with the MPA. Even though many of these areas had their own improvement clubs, they lacked the kind of established business community that could translate into a broad-based claim on municipal resources. The MPA, on the other hand, did have access to city government. The association held open meetings in its hall “each Monday night,” where smaller neighborhood groups would air their concerns.25 These groups—like the North of Army Promotion Club, the Peralta Improvement Club, and the West of Castro Improvement Club—formally appointed “delegates” to the MPA to lobby for their local interests.26 By 1911, the MPA represented thirty-two such clubs.27 By 1908 the Call reported that “all the improvement clubs on the south side of San Francisco look upon it [the MPA] as a sort of central body to be called upon whenever assistance is needed to promote a local improvement. To these demands upon it the association never fails to respond.”28 The MPA, in turn, called upon these clubs to support its own campaigns, whether or not those campaigns had a direct impact on the outlying districts. The leadership of the MPA aggressively courted the smaller clubs, in spite of the fact that they themselves lived and ran their businesses in the core of the Mission (within the smaller area in fig. 3.1), partly because a larger constituency translated into a stronger hand in citywide planning debates. So it was largely the desire to compete with downtown that explains the MPA’s many campaigns to provide better rail and road connections between the Mission and the rest of the southern half of San Francisco.29 In some instances the MPA courted Mission-based union support for these projects by arguing that the connections would facilitate laborers’ trips to work.30 The more important purpose, though, was not to carry unionist residents to outlying districts but rather to bring outlying capital into the Mission. The purpose was also to grow the MPA’s constituency, and therefore its power in the broader city. The most powerful local group that sent delegates to the MPA was based not in the outlying districts but in the heart of the Mission. Founded in 1910 (and still operating at the time of this writing), the Mission Merchants’ Association would prove to be an important ally. The Merchants occasionally collaborated with the MPA not only in organizing ceremonies, such as the opening of a theater or the hall of an ethnic club, but also on more substantive issues, like street improvements and a campaign to compel insurance companies to lower rates on commercial properties.31 Yet even though the

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Merchants would wield more power through the coming decades, the organization never rivaled the influence of the MPA in its heyday. In its capacity as a “central body,” the MPA was not unlike the Civic League of Improvement Clubs, an organization that also served as a kind of association of neighborhood groups. The Civic League collaborated with the MPA on occasion, as it did on a citywide beautification campaign in 1912. In this project, the two organizations carved San Francisco into twelve geographical areas, which the groups called “City Beautiful Districts,” then assigned informal jurisdiction for each to a number of organizations, mostly improvement clubs.32 The idea was to coordinate improvement efforts and foster a more comprehensive view of city planning among individual neighborhoods. Though the Burnham plan had also projected a comprehensive view of city planning, it was one in which San Francisco constituted a single, unified public—one that required a “central directing power,” as Willis Polk had put it. Here, by contrast, was a more federated view of comprehensive, citywide planning, one that acknowledged multiple publics and delegated authority to those publics—those cities within the larger city. But while the organizations shared a common vision for planning and even collaborated on occasion, they also differed in important ways. The league nominally represented the improvement clubs across the entire city, while the MPA claimed to represent clubs in the south of San Francisco. Another key difference was the fact that the Civic League did not initiate improvement campaigns; it only supported those of its member organizations. Furthermore, the league regularly deferred to the MPA, which it regarded as the founder of the improvement club movement and as “one of the most powerful organizations,” of any kind, in the city.33 (The predecessor to the Civic League had been explicitly modeled on the predecessor to the MPA.34) In 1916 the league’s president wrote, “We regret that the MPA is not affiliated with the Civic League, but we have the most earnest hope that some day soon they will be.”35 A simple survey of the local press provides another measure of the relative importance of the two organizations. Between 1906 and 1920 the MPA was mentioned in 537 articles in the Chronicle, while the Civic League of Improvement Clubs was mentioned in 199 articles; in the Call, the numbers were 671 and 202, respectively. In both publications, it was not uncommon to find articles wherein nearly half of the text was occupied by quotations from MPA officials, a journalistic practice that clearly illustrated the media’s staunch support and ensured that the association’s self-perceptions would be well publicized.36 Both papers presented the MPA in an almost uniformly positive light, and in 1909 the Call reported that the “Mission promotion association is gener-

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ally considered to be the largest and most influential civic organization in San Francisco.”37 A review of the association’s accomplishments suggests that these were not idle superlatives. By 1907, the MPA had already attracted much attention from the press. The Chronicle reported that each week has seen a committee from the association before the Board of Supervisors, with the result, the district has secured appropriations for streets, lights and sewers. Valencia street has been brightly illuminated through the work of the committee. Street cleaning, sprinkling and sanitation for the Mission have been vastly improved. The association assists every other improvement club in the district, lending its influence and creating public opinion on subjects of general interest.38

The MPA’s work in securing appropriations alone would have marked an auspicious beginning. But the association’s influence extended well beyond the supervisors’ chambers.

The MPA and the State of California In the aftermath of the fire, insurance rates went up between 100 and 900  percent. This change “retarded the development of the Mission” in spite of the fact that much of the Mission did not burn in the first place and the fire protections there had been completely modernized.39 As far as the MPA’s leadership was concerned, by 1907 the Mission was likely one of the safest places in the country to be in the event of an urban conflagration. This circumstance prompted the association to undertake one of its first major campaigns. Armed with statistics about gallons of water available in cisterns, numbers of fire engines, and premiums in other cities, the MPA approached the Board of the Underwriters of the Pacific—the organization that governed insurance companies for the entire western United States—to “demand” that rates be lowered.40 The Board of the Underwriters agreed to meet directly with the MPA’s insurance committee, chaired by Sullivan.41 The committee asked the underwriters “to make the Mission a separate section of the city and fix a rate for it.”42 Sullivan and company reasoned that when it came to preparedness, the Mission was not like the rest of San Francisco; it was a city within a city and should be treated accordingly. The campaign succeeded, with the result that a western-regional association of insurance companies agreed to change its rates at the request of a single neighborhood group.43 The change only applied to residential

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properties, however, and two years later the MPA was back to demand that commercial properties in the Mission also receive a lower rate. The Chronicle reported that the MPA took “up the fight with characteristic vigor” and succeeded, once again, in securing a lower rate for the Mission.44 But the victories seem to have been short-lived: in 1912, the MPA and Board of the Underwriters were at it again. The Call reported that in public hearings on the matter, “Matt I. Sullivan, appearing on behalf of the Mission Promotion association, heaped  .  .  . coals of fire upon the heads of the underwriters.”45 But in addition to the frontal attack, this time Sullivan and associates also pursued another strategy by drafting state legislation to create a commission regulating fire insurance rates.46 According to the Call, this effort succeeded, and it was not until 1918 that the rates would creep back up to levels that would once again prompt the MPA to insist that the underwriters more sharply separate the Mission from the rest of San Francisco.47 The MPA’s battles over fire insurance rates illustrate a number of features that characterized the association. As a body that represented a neighborhood, it could insert itself into discussions that its leaders could not. Consider the person of Matt Sullivan. As a resident of the Mission and a board member for the two main Mission banks, Sullivan had a clear interest in seeing fire insurance rates drop. At various points in the period from 1906 to 1920, Sullivan was a powerful attorney, a supervisor, the chair of the California Republican Party, chief justice of the California Supreme Court, and president of the San Francisco Planning Commission. He would not have had standing as an individual resident or a local banker to challenge the Underwriters of the Pacific. But nor did he invoke the authority of any of his other powerful positions when bringing the fight over insurance rates. It was his position as a leader of the neighborhood association that gave him authority in these debates. The fact that a western-regional association of insurers fared poorly in several confrontations with the MPA clearly illustrates how powerful neighborhood capitalism was with respect to better-studied interest groups like insurers. The MPA competed in an arena that extended far beyond the supervisors’ annual budget meetings. Not only did the MPA grapple successfully with the Underwriters of the Pacific, but as early as 1907 it was already playing a key role in converting the marshy Islais Creek into a harbor, a project that carried obvious benefits for the Mission.48 Army Street (today Caesar Chavez Street) runs east through the core of the Mission District, terminating at Islais Creek on the San Francisco Bay. This meant that goods and capital from an Islais Creek harbor would flow directly from the bay

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into the Mission, giving the neighborhood another opportunity to consolidate its independence—and even to challenge the commercial ascendancy of downtown by competing with the harbor to the north for shipping and nearby manufacturing.49 The MPA was at the center of the campaign to fill sixty-four blocks of submerged land around Islais Creek to create the land necessary for the new harbor.50 Legislation known as the India Basin Act would enable the state to purchase the water lots with a $1 million bond issue, to be paid off with revenues from the new port rather than by taxpayers. When the first version of the bill emerged with some features not to the MPA’s liking, it was the association that pushed Governor Gillette to “call a special session of the Legislature to remedy the defects of the Indian Basin act passed at the last session.”51 The request was granted, and it was Rolph and Sullivan, acting on behalf of the MPA, who actually drafted the final version of the state legislation.52 The plan would be put to a statewide vote in November 1908, and in the meantime the MPA would campaign tirelessly for its passage. One of its principal strategies for promoting the project was to form a single-interest civic group, the Islais Creek Inland Harbor Association (later sometimes referred to in the press as the India Basin Association). The Chronicle described the entity as “an adjunct of the Mission Promotion” Association, and the MPA made no secret of the fact.53 The Harbor Association held its meetings in the MPA’s hall; its president was George Center, a prominent member of the MPA, and its secretary, F. J. Churchill, was also secretary of the MPA.54 Both men would often appear in public and would speak on behalf of both the MPA and the Harbor Association simultaneously. It was these neighborhood affiliations that gave Center and Churchill standing to speak. Just as Sullivan routinely invoked his affiliation with the neighborhood group rather than any of his other powerful affiliations, here Center would only invoke the MPA and the Harbor Association and never his position as a San Francisco supervisor, a job he held from 1907 to 1910. The Harbor Association mounted a statewide media campaign to urge passage of the India Basin Act.55 At the same time the MPA’s engineer, C. L. McEnerney, made many public presentations to address all of the technical questions that arose in connection with the project.56 In spite of these efforts, and in spite of the fact that the measure won three to one among San Francisco residents, the initiative would fail at the state level.57 The Call and the Chronicle both attributed this outcome to a statewide countercampaign—mounted by some ship owners and lumber concerns who held land that would be affected—which falsely suggested that San Francisco vot-

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ers were against the plan.58 The opponents to the measure argued that sixtyfour blocks was far too many, and that forty should suffice for the harbor.59 But immediately after the defeat, the MPA threw itself back into the fray, now with overwhelming and incontrovertible public support. The next statewide vote went in favor of the harbor, and the press would attribute the victory to the MPA, with the Call reporting that the association “successfully piloted the India basin act through three sessions of the Legislature and through two State elections.”60 After the bill passed, the MPA remained intimately involved with the project. The question of precisely which lots the state should purchase was only “decided on after a conference between the state authorities and the committee of the Mission Promotion Association having the matter in charge.”61 Not only was the MPA instrumental in selecting the land, it also negotiated the price of some lots that had become a subject of controversy. The Chronicle reported that “under the terms of an agreement drawn up by the Mission Promotion Association’s committee and entered into by the state, and the private owners of the five blocks adjoining Kentucky street, it was agreed that the land so improved should be sold to the state for the unimproved valuation, plus the exact price of filling the submerged blocks.”62 Once again, this neighborhood group wielded a surprising measure of influence with the state—a measure of influence that often allowed neighborhood capitalism to prevail over the interests of industrial capital. The MPA exerted influence with the state legislature not only in connection with the Burnham plan, fire insurance rates, and questions about the harbor, but also when it came to debates around San Francisco’s National Guard armory. The armory on Van Ness Avenue and Pine Street, at the foot of Nob Hill, had been destroyed in 1906. In 1909, the state of California created a siting committee composed of Governor James Gillette, Mayor P. H. McCarthy, and State Attorney General U. S. Webb. The MPA formed its own committee—which included Sullivan, Rolph, and Center—to advocate for a lot at Mission and Fourteenth Streets, where the Southern Pacific hospital had operated before being destroyed in the disaster of 1906.63 When the state committee announced that they had selected a site on Van Ness and Bay Street—not far from the original site, but nearer to Russian Hill—the MPA turned up the pressure, objecting that the site was too far from the center of the city and arguing that the armory should instead be located in the northern Mission, near the Civic Center. The association’s objection provoked a skirmish with the San Francisco Real Estate Board, which played out in public hearings and newspaper columns.64 But the MPA carried the day. In March 1910, Mayor McCarthy

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appeared before a meeting of the association to announce that the state committee had changed its mind, deciding upon a site advocated by the MPA’s committee. The mayor praised “the work of the Mission Promotion Association,” and the MPA, in turn, made him, Governor Gillette, and Attorney General Webb all honorary members.65 As for all of the “funds thus far subscribed  .  .  . with a view to the purchase of the lot on Van Ness,” those were simply transferred to the Mission site.66 The MPA thus secured for the district $100,000 for the lot, paid for by citizens from the entire city, not just the Mission. Moreover, the association secured not only a $420,000 investment from the state legislature, beating out the wealthier neighborhood of Russian Hill, but also a promise from the National Guard that the armory would serve as a community center in the evenings and on weekends.67 The MPA hoped that a fine new public facility would spur a building boom in the northwest section of the neighborhood, an area that “had been heretofore neglected by the property owner.” By 1911, these hopes had already been realized, at least in the MPA’s estimation, and the effects apparently extended beyond the northwest section. The Chronicle reported in October 1911 that “the Mission is experiencing the greatest building era of its history,” as “high-class structures”—of good design and sturdy materials— sprang up everywhere. According to MPA secretary F. J. Churchill, one “of the principal incentives for the building improvements that are so apparent throughout the Mission is the acquisition by the state of California of a site in the Mission for a National Guard Armory.”68 Though it seems likely that Churchill was overestimating (perhaps consciously exaggerating) the effect that one building was having, the MPA’s representations of the armory merit attention—not only because the planning debate illustrated the MPA’s agility in the competition among neighborhoods, but also because the campaign illustrated the association’s vision for the Mission and for its rightful place in the larger city.

Unanimity within Neighborhood, Conflict between Neighborhoods The MPA can be described as proto-planning authority not only because it was pushing for comprehensive planning, and not only because it led the creation of the City Planning Commission itself, but also because the MPA understood itself as a quasi-legal representative of the public. In a particularly blustery moment, the secretary of the association, F. L. Churchill, described the MPA as “the parliament of San Francisco.” He asserted that

72 / Chapter Three no great public step is taken in San Francisco or California unless the Mission Promotion Association is previously consulted. . . . It has given evidence that an association of civic workers can be non-political, public spirited, disinterested in personal aims and only striving after the greatest good to the greatest number. Its greatest effect, however, has been to place the Mission on the map and to make it an integral part of San Francisco.69

Churchill’s statement illustrates a belief that it was the MPA’s duty to represent the public, but it also illustrates a certain slippage in the scale at which that public was defined—from California to San Francisco to the Mission. Elsewhere Churchill expressed the transposition more succinctly: “What benefits the Mission benefits the other portions of the city.”70 The MPA had gone from an association that insisted on self-determination for neighborhoods to one that claimed to represent the entire city. But while the MPA viewed the Mission’s interests as identical with the larger public interest, the association’s critics were well attuned to the fact that “its greatest effect” was to benefit itself and its home neighborhood. That is to say that critics of the MPA regarded the association itself as a special interest. When in 1910 the MPA asserted that the Mission was not receiving its share of the Parks Department’s budget, Commissioner William Metson protested that the MPA’s campaign was “based on distortion of facts and untrue statements so that the district which is represented by said association may get more than their share of the public funds and thereby cripple the other districts of San Francisco. . . . Leave it to the Mission get their share and then some of any public funds that are to be distributed.”71 In 1920 a Haight-based citizen group calling themselves the Public Schools Defense Association mounted a drive to dislodge the Mission’s control of the San Francisco school board. The group charged that the board was “besotted with politics,” and that members of the board were “appointed because the appointment of ‘so-and-so’ would please the people of the Mission.”72 As far as the Defense Association was concerned, the Mission’s domination of the school board was the result of vulgar patronage. There was a remarkable degree of unanimity within the Mission; or perhaps it’s safer to observe that whatever dissent there may have been did not register in the press, supervisors’ chambers, or in any other arena that is documented in the available sources. But while there was consensus within the neighborhood, there was a great deal of rancor between the neighborhoods, and between neighborhoods and public agencies.73 The MPA easily handled challenges from all quarters until it dissolved in 1920. At that point, the Mission Merchants’ Association took up the

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mantle of neighborhood promotion and continued to move projects that the MPA had advocated in the 1910s through city government. These included new playgrounds, a 1927 remodel of Mission High School, and even more ambitious projects.74 The Bernal Cut, for example, was an Old Southern Pacific line to the south of the core of the Mission. In 1917, the MPA lobbied the city to purchase the land and convert it to a highway, in order to “remove a large portion of the traffic from Mission Street, thereby relieving congestion on that street.”75 It was not until 1927 that a $1.4 million bond issue passed allowing the project to move forward. Work was completed in 1930. The Roaring Twenties are often thought of as a period hostile to the reform movements of the preceding decades. But in the arena of urban development, a long Progressive Era prevailed. In San Francisco, the campaigns to municipalize water, electrical power, and public transit were alive and well through the 1920s. The municipal government continued to fund physical improvements through the decade, and it continued to finance those improvements with tax revenue and bond issues. Improvement clubs also continued to thrive. The story was similar in Cincinnati, and we might expect the same of other American cities, though further research is needed to test those assumptions.76 As it turns out, the MPA itself does conform to the standard periodization. Its paper trail runs cold in 1920. Because there is no record of the dissolution of the MPA, it is impossible to know precisely why it dissolved when it did. Several things are clear, though: the MPA’s agenda was carried on by the Mission Merchants’ Association; also, the dissolution of the MPA coincided with the ascension of its leaders to government offices, and with the formal establishment of city planning in San Francisco. Perhaps the association dissolved because it was no longer needed. Neighborhood capitalism was firmly established. The Merchants continued the fight for the established planning agenda, while the former MPA’s leaders were freed to remake the government of San Francisco.

From the Improvement Clubs to City Hall: The MPA and the Rolph Administration By 1911, ULP mayor P. H. McCarthy was in trouble. His tenure was not scandal-ridden, as the mayoralty of Schmitz, his ULP predecessor, had been, and McCarthy had fulfilled his promise to dutifully pursue a Progressive business agenda. However, he had proven feckless in that task, particularly when it came to the campaign to municipalize streetcar and

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water services.77 The Progressive business community now found itself nostalgic for the Phelan years. In the person of James Rolph they saw a candidate with all of Phelan’s qualities—energy, vision, and a tireless devotion to improvement—but without Phelan’s fatal flaw: his tendency to alienate the ever-important labor movement. In fact, Rolph had proven himself a friend to labor on many occasions. The MPA’s home industry campaign alone had endeared him to the city’s unions, yet it was Rolph’s tireless work on behalf of improvement that made him such an obvious candidate. The “powerful idea” of improvement had indeed served to unite factions that were otherwise mutually antagonistic.78 Though Rolph was a Republican, he was nominated by a bipartisan municipal conference, chaired by Sullivan, also a Republican, and Gavin McNab, a Democrat.79 As in Progressive Era Boston, Baltimore, and Buffalo, “commitment to improvement was more important than even party loyalty.”80 In November 1911 Rolph was elected, soundly defeating McCarthy and beginning San Francisco’s longest mayoralty, which stretched from 1912 until 1931, when he was elected governor of California. As soon as he entered city hall, Rolph formally resigned his position as president of the MPA, but he remained intimately involved with its activities. The city government continued to rely on the MPA not only to make and advocate for plans but to exert influence in the political sphere. The water debates in San Francisco illustrate how the MPA related to the city government during the Rolph administration. Like many other Progressive entities, the MPA had long advocated for the city to purchase the Spring Valley Water Company’s operations, but the company had proven hostile to municipalization. In the 1890s, many entertained ideas for how to break private control of the water supply; the most promising strategy was to secure a different supply. The eventual solution was to dam a valley called Hetch Hetchy, two hundred miles away in the newly created Yosemite National Park, in 1923.81 Speaking in early 1931, Rolph claimed “that the Mission Promotion Association was the first to agitate for the purchase of Hetch Hetchy.”82 It was true that the MPA was a vocal supporter and a major donor to the project, but Hetch Hetchy had been under discussion for at least a decade. The MPA was not formed until 1906, so Rolph’s claim was certainly an exaggeration.83 Rolph was perhaps referring to the fact that Phelan, his friend and later MPA member, had purchased rights to the Tuolumne River as a private citizen in 1901.84 Rolph also claimed that in 1906 the MPA, acting alone, purchased crucial water rights to the Hetch Hetchy valley and presented them to the city; the association was reimbursed only years later.85 Whatever the precise facts, there was no ques-

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tion that the MPA was a major booster for the Hetch Hetchy project. Key figures like City Engineer M. M. O’Shaughnessy (the dam’s designer and namesake) would debate the project in public forums in the MPA’s hall.86 If Rolph’s account is to be trusted, the MPA also secured some crucial rights for the city. This was no small role to play, but it was still a limited one, at least when compared to the association’s role in establishing a harbor at Islais Creek or securing lower insurance rates. However, when it came to another strategy for breaking Spring Valley’s control—the outright purchase of the existing water supply—the MPA played a larger role. Matt Sullivan was again at the center of the campaign. On February 5, 1912, only a month into his mayoralty, Rolph created the Advisory Water Committee, charged with representing “the city in negotiations with the officials of the Spring Valley Water Company for the purchase of that system.”87 Sullivan was the chair.88 In 1915, when the future of Hetch Hetchy was still uncertain, the MPA sponsored a scheme to buy Spring Valley’s principal water source, Lake Merced, as well as the land surrounding the lake. In addition to securing the water for San Francisco at a fraction of the cost of Hetch Hetchy, the plan devoted all of the land, and almost half of the lake, to recreation. This would have amounted to about 823 acres, which the MPA billed “The Mission’s Big Park,” in the southwestern corner of the city, miles beyond where most San Franciscans conceived of the Mission District’s boundaries. The plan fizzled in the end. The city did not begin acquiring the land surrounding Lake Merced until the 1920s, and it did not acquire the water rights until 1930. But the effort illustrates the amount of influence that the MPA enjoyed. The city engineer, M. M. O’Shaughnessy, conducted numerous surveys of the land and lent his authority and credibility to the plan, while Sullivan provided the legal analysis, both as a member of the MPA and as the chair of the mayor’s Advisory Water Committee.89 With the documentation available, it is difficult to tell if the plan originated with the MPA and was supported by the city, or the other way around. But the very uncertainty testifies to the MPA’s status as a quasi-official planning agency. This status worried the MPA’s critics, who accused it of benefiting from patronage, but many observers were also troubled by the possible corruption of the improvement clubs in general. The San Francisco Call was a vocal supporter of the clubs, believing they were a great benefit to the larger city. However, in an editorial that mentioned the MPA, the paper warned that it would be “treason” for the improvement clubs “to forfeit an iota of public confidence”; they “must keep themselves free of political machinery and clean of corporation domination, which not all of them have always

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done.”90 Though there was no hint that the MPA had any questionable connections to corporations, its political activities were another matter. The question of whether or not improvement clubs were “political” also presented an uncomfortable paradox for the Civic League of Improvement Clubs throughout the 1910s. The president of the league asked how the clubs could distinguish themselves from “special interests,” since they did represent specific districts.91 How could they assuage “the fear of our returning to the old boss or ward rule”?92 The answer was to claim universality: clubs had to argue that they were acting not in their own interest but rather in the public interest, and so were nonpolitical. The masthead of the Newsletter of the Civic League of Improvement Clubs contained two slogans that implied and depended on each other for their legitimacy: “Absolutely Non-partisan” and “For Civic Betterment.” As evidence that it was nonpolitical, in 1912 the league pointed to its policy of not endorsing candidates.93 In 1917, however, the league amended its constitution and began devoting entire issues of its newsletter to ballot endorsements. “In pursuing this action,” the editors argued, “the Civic League will continue to be ABSOLUTELY NON-POLITCAL, for it will place no candidates of its own in the field.”94 The MPA, however, never refrained from endorsing candidates, and though no one ever ran on an MPA ticket, its leadership moved easily between government jobs and their positions in the association. Center and Sullivan served as supervisors from 1906 to 1910. A Chronicle article reported that the “plans started by the Mission association deftly became a part of the municipal program a year later [after the ouster of Schmitz] when Judge Matt I. Sullivan was made a supervisor.  .  .  . As supervisor, ‘Uncle’ Matt brought to the city’s attention the plans sponsored by the Mission association.”95 Father D. O. Crowley, another MPA board member, was appointed president of the Playground Commission in 1912.96 Rolph’s mayoral papers (1912–30) are brimming with correspondence that might have provided fodder for those wishing to demonstrate that the Mission benefited from patronage. Smaller improvement clubs from the Mission regularly requested and received favors from public agencies; comparable requests from other neighborhoods were rare.97 Businesspeople affiliated with the Mission Merchants’ Association, as well as light-industrial concerns from the neighborhood, wrote to ask for zoning variances or outright re-zonings and were apparently accommodated.98 Not only were MPA regulars appointed to prominent government positions, but ordinary Mission residents regularly received less prestigious posts. On March 19, 1924, for example, one George F. Kelley wrote the following to the mayor:

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“Our dear little friend Louis Traschler, 331 Capp street [in the Mission], is desirous of becoming an engineer at the new Municipal Swimming Pool. I had a conversation with the Secretary of the Board of Park Commissioners, Captain Lamb, whom I found a wonderfully clever gentleman and understanding the game, and a line booster for James Rolph, Junior.”99 Handwritten on the letter is a note reading “Bennie, The Mayor wants you to do anything you can for him.” Handwritten notes to this same effect appear on many of the letters from the Mission, giving the impression that “the game” Kelley referred to was played according to the rules of a patronage system. While political fealty was apparently rewarded, disloyalty was also punished, a fact that was most prominently exemplified by the case of Philomene Hagan, the secretary of the Playground Commission. Miss Hagan had served on the commission for thirteen years and was universally regarded as an outstanding employee.100 Yet when she voted for a personal friend rather than the Rolph candidate for the position of city attorney, the mayor demanded her resignation.101 Hagan pled for her position, eventually sending Rolph a four-page report titled “Activities as Evidencing my Loyalty.”102 In spite of her pleas—and a public outcry that was expressed in petitions, outraged letters to the mayor, and newspaper editorials—Hagan was eventually removed from her post.103 The MPA’s influence extended beyond staffing questions and favors to friends; the association also influenced the structure of municipal government. The MPA was a key player in the foundation of San Francisco’s City Planning Commission. The initial draft of the legislation establishing the commission specified that the MPA would have at least one appointee, along with the Chamber of Commerce, the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the San Francisco Real Estate Board, the BTC, and other citywide entities.104 The MPA was alone on the list insofar as it was the only entity devoted to a geographical area, or set of interests, narrower than the entirety of San Francisco. The final legislation from 1914 dropped language specifying organizations, but when the commission was finally appointed in 1917, the presidency went to none other than Matt Sullivan.105 By the Civic League’s criteria, then, the MPA probably would have qualified as a machine, though of course the league would never have said so. In order to understand the contours of political influence during this period, it is important to understand details about the Progressive-versus-machine model of urban politics—less because historians rely on this framework and more because the historical actors themselves often invoked it, typi-

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cally in attempts to discredit opponents. First it must be observed that in twentieth-century San Francisco, the model obscures more than it explains.106 Indeed, the normal expectations are reversed in San Francisco.107 The ULP administration of Schmitz (1902–7) was more fiscally austere— holding down administrative costs and maintaining a low tax regime— than the Progressive administration of Phelan (1897–1902) had been.108 Neither Schmitz nor McCarthy’s ULP administrations (1910–12) offered a legislative platform that proposed to aid the working poor; rather, both ran successfully as business administrations.109 The perceived failures of the McCarthy administration had nothing to do with bosses, machines, patronage, or graft. As McCarthy’s 1909 mayoral campaign advertised that “a business administration along legitimate liberal lines is that which our city needs most. This is what the people want, and I will give it.”110 McCarthy was true to his word, pursuing a Progressive business agenda, focusing particular attention on the campaign to municipalize the streetcar and water utilities. His administration was swept out of office in 1912 not because of graft but largely because it had bungled the municipalization effort.111 As an interpretive framework, the concept of a political machine is not much help in explaining Progressive Era San Francisco. However, as an historical artifact in its own right, the concept demands attention. Many of the leaders and supporters of the improvement club movement were themselves concerned about the possibility of creating a new set of Progressive machines. It seems that the MPA would have fit the bill better than the ULP, or any other organization in the city for that matter. The MPA was an extra-official entity that drove many policy decisions, supplied many of the leaders of city government, and drew the bulk of its political support from a neighborhood—a union neighborhood, at that. Furthermore, all indications suggest that this neighborhood benefited from patronage. Still, other features that historians have come to identify with machine politics were notably absent from the MPA’s operations, most notably graft. While it is difficult to maintain that Rolph was beholden to any machine, run by either the unions or the MPA, there is no question that the administration worked closely with both. The connections are well illustrated by the events following the Preparedness Day bombing. In the run-up to the United States’ entry into World War I, the city organized a Preparedness Day march on Market Street, for July 22, 1916. A bomb was detonated at the march, killing ten people.112 Incensed by what it viewed as labor terrorism, a conservative faction of the Chamber of Commerce organized a “Law and Order Committee” and an open-shop drive.113 True to its political allies, the MPA issued a resolution announcing that

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the “Mission Promotion Association flays Law and Order Committee as follows: Industrial peace is necessary for the welfare and prosperity of every community. Industrial war, with its attendant evils, injuriously effects [sic] not only the immediate parties to the conflict, but also the public at large.”114 But labor was not the only party that the MPA sought to defend. According to the resolution, the Law and Order Committee had mounted a “relentless campaign of defamation against the Mayor and his administration, and incidentally against the city. There is no calumny too vile for its members to utter or print against the most progressive Mayor that ever presided over the destinies of San Francisco.” Indeed, the MPA sought to defend San Francisco itself: “In its insane crusade against labor and for the dissemination of its infamous propaganda, this Committee has adopted as its official organ the Los Angeles Times, the most vicious enemy of unionism and of San Francisco to be found within the confines of the United States.” Because the Law and Order Committee was attacking not only labor but also the mayor and the larger city, and because it was therefore responsible for provoking “industrial war,” the MPA resolved that “the best interests of the City and County of San Francisco demand a speedy dissolution of said Committee.”115 The resolution laid out the MPA’s vision of who belonged to the public: the labor unions and the business community represented by the MPA. The Chamber of Commerce, however, did not belong—its committee was injuriously affecting “the public at large.” Though there is no evidence of coordination, the mayor and the MPA presented a unified front in this fight. It must be observed that Rolph was not in the habit of biting his tongue. He angrily repudiated the Law and Order Committee on a number of occasions, and over the coming three years he sided with labor in two other strikes, accusing the committee and the United Railroads Company of stirring “class hatred.”116 However, the MPA took much more strident positions than it would have been politic for the mayor to have voiced. The MPA clearly served as an attack dog for city hall. In the long run, these efforts would not make much difference for San Francisco’s labor movement. Around the same time, the United States Steel Corporation initiated an effective nationwide open-shop drive, known as the “American Plan.” Bolstered by the successes of the plan, and by a national shift to the right in the wake of World War I, the sentiment of the San Francisco business community was turning against labor. When the Chamber of Commerce took up the American Plan in 1921, the MPA had already dissolved and Rolph did not fight the tide. For the remainder of the decade, San Francisco was an open-shop city. Yet even through the 1920s, labor continued to cooperate with Rolph and with improvement

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club campaigns. Physical improvement still meant improved services for union memberships, and it still meant jobs, even if they were no longer on union terms. And though Rolph had been unable to rescue the closed shop, he had indeed tried. If the MPA’s prominent role in municipal politics is surprising, its influence in the arena of city planning is even more so. Here was a neighborhood-based group that not only advocated for plans, that not only made plans, but that integrated plans for water supply, parks, harbor facilities, streets, schools, transportation infrastructure, and more—all in an era when each of these arenas was treated as a discrete concern, under the purview of a discrete agency. The MPA can be thought of as a protoplanning authority: it undertook land use planning for the southern half of San Francisco, and was effective in ensuring that those plans were implemented, for more than a decade before the San Francisco Planning Commission came into being. Moreover, it was closely connected to the establishment of that commission. The Burnham plan may have marked a moment when San Franciscans began to think seriously about comprehensive city planning, but the MPA marked the emergence of an effective planning entity: a single organization that focused on the interconnections among fire insurance rates and sewer systems, playgrounds and the port. The MPA’s methods, however, were more incrementalist and pragmatic than those that would have been necessary to implement the Burnham plan. A number of historians have described the rejection of Burnham’s scheme as “The Defeat of Planning.”117 Considering that such a wide-ranging plan was proposed and defeated, it is clear why this interpretation is attractive. Yet it turns out to be a difficult position to maintain. The early twentieth century was one of the major building eras in San Francisco history. When one looks closely, it becomes clear that the various building campaigns were indeed planned, even if they did not conform to a single, overarching, centralized scheme. Burnham was wrong: it was precisely the little plans that would be realized. And the MPA’s many projects were no less planned because they dealt with one concern at a time and were implemented incrementally. In some respects, then, the MPA might actually be compared to the Chicago Plan Commission insofar as the commission was essentially Chicago’s first formalized planning body, the first iteration of what would eventually become the Department of City Planning.118 San Francisco’s closest equivalent to the Chicago Plan Commission would not be the Committee on Reconstruction that was convened after the disaster of 1906: both bodies may have been devoted to promoting an overarching plan de-

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veloped by Daniel Burnham, but the San Francisco commission tore itself apart almost as soon as it was formed, while the Chicago Plan Commission exerted substantial influence for decades. One might also suggest that the closest equivalent would be the San Francisco City Planning Commission. But the Chicago Commission was a semi-official body under the effective control of a private entity, the Commercial Club, while the San Francisco Commission was fully a public body. Also, the Chicago Plan Commission was formed for the express purpose of promoting the Burnham plan, while the San Francisco Commission would be established much later, in 1917, and would have nothing to do with the Burnham plan, whose “swan song” had already been sung five years earlier.119 Finally, the Chicago Plan Commission was behind a major building campaign, while the San Francisco Commission focused only on zoning for at least a decade. The MPA was clearly different from the Chicago Plan Commission in that it was formed partly out of opposition to one of Burnham’s plans, while the Chicago Commission was formed expressly to promote another one. Yet the MPA was similar insofar as it was essentially a private entity that operated as a semi-official body that was closely associated with a substantial building record—and engaged in comprehensive city planning well before other agencies and organizations would. Historians have not paid much attention to organizations like the MPA, but there are good reasons to believe that such entities were not so uncommon. We know that Boston, at least, had similar organizations, like the Jamaica Plain Citizens’ Association, which served as a broker between ordinary citizens and the municipal government on issues that extended well beyond beautification and pothole repair.120 The association addressed itself to a number of planning concerns—like streets, transportation infrastructure, and public buildings—through standing committees, and it appears to have been more formally organized than most improvement clubs. The association was not only respected by local politicians of both parties, but it also had some real influence in the state legislature.121 There is no indication that the Boston-based association wielded the same broad geographic influence that the MPA enjoyed, but more research is needed to understand exactly how it did compare.122 What is clear is that, like the MPA, the Jamaica Plain Citizens’ Association was a neighborhood-based entity that was much more powerful than a typical improvement club. It would be very surprising to learn that the MPA and the Jamaica Plain Citizens’ Association were the only two such entities in the entire country. The very existence of such groups complicates the prevailing view of city planning during the Progressive Era. In the by-now standard telling of this

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history, city planning was synonymous with the City Beautiful—in other words, with grand neoclassical schemes, typically sponsored by powerful business interests, and typically requiring a centralization of authority to be realized.123 Yet the improvement club movement illustrates that there were also influential planning agendas that emanated from neighborhoods. These groups sometimes sponsored the grand City Beautiful schemes, but they also often opposed them, advancing a countervailing vision in which planning would be piecemeal and decentralized.

Conclusion Many observers regarded the MPA as the most powerful civic group in Progressive Era San Francisco, and there is an abundance of evidence to support this interpretation. Having been instrumental in preventing the centralization of planning power that would have been carried out under the Burnham plan, the association established itself as a de facto planning authority, one that not only promoted plans but actually made them. The MPA represented fully half of the geographic area of San Francisco, and more than half its population. It not only trounced other neighborhoods in the contest for municipal investment, but it also wielded decisive influence with the Underwriters of the Pacific and with the California state legislature. Through the 1910s, the leaders of the MPA became, in large measure, the leaders of San Francisco. The association was at the center of the effort to create the city’s first planning commission, and one of the MPA’s founders would become its president. Until well into the 1930s, the government of San Francisco would ensure that the Mission was treated very well indeed. The MPA was the entity most responsible for remaking San Francisco’s political economy according to the interests of neighborhoods; it was the entity that best exemplified the ascendency of neighborhood capitalism.

FOUR

The Mission and the Spatial Imagination: Discourse, Ethnicity, and Architecture

Between 1906 and 1920, the Mission Promotion Association (MPA) wielded influence not only in the chambers of the Board of Supervisors but also in the California state legislature. After 1920, the Mission Merchants’ Association took up the mantle from the MPA and continued to dominate the interdistrict contest for municipal largesse on behalf of the Mission. All of this was accomplished through the personal connections and political savvy of the leaders of these neighborhood-based groups, as well as through their skill in coalition building—particularly with the city’s powerful labor unions. But impressive as these institutional maneuverings were, on their own they are insufficient to explain how the leaders of the Mission District consolidated their neighborhood as a city within a city. The political and institutional work was underwritten and enabled by cultural labor. The MPA, merchants, and the unions all very consciously advanced a set of narratives that identified the Mission as a distinctive geographical area, with a distinctive identity. This identity was promoted though a variety of cultural strategies: discursive, historical, architectural, and spatial. Many of these strategies coalesced around—or were at least inflected by—a politics of ethnicity. Though each of the powerful local institutions had their own version of “the Mission,” the multiple versions complemented more than they contradicted one another. There is every indication that ordinary residents of the neighborhood took these identifications on board: the Mission was the bearer of a noble Spanish tradition. The Mission was the oldest and most venerable neighborhood in the city, and so should be regarded as the heart of San Francisco. The Mission was the scrappy underdog that had the guts to stand up to the behemoth of downtown. The Mission was the workingman’s neighborhood. The Mission was white.

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While the opening chapters of Making the Mission narrated the political and institutional story of the Mission District, this final chapter of part 1 focuses on the cultural dimensions of how the Mission attained neighborhood-based power during the long Progressive Era. I analyze the discursive and architectural strategies that were employed by the MPA and the Merchants, as well as those employed by the unions, and demonstrate how a politics of ethnicity inflected all of this cultural work.

Dramatis Personae: The Mission, Downtown Undergirding all of the MPA’s successes was a claim to a moral authority; undergirding that moral authority was a claim on the public interest. The association mobilized this logic whenever an individual or group opposed one of its projects. The controversy over Islais Creek provides a case in point. When the Federated Harbor Improvement Associations suggested that the project be postponed, the MPA pointed to a federation official’s ties to both the Acme Lumber Company and to large-property owners who would be affected. The MPA accused the federation official of representing a “personal financial interest.”1 When the draymen and the lumber company spoke against the plan, the MPA argued that they were trying “to keep the harbor from spreading south” (away from downtown and nearer to the Mission) because “the lands there might be used for lumber purposes.” Their opposition, the MPA charged, “could be due only to selfishness.”2 The MPA insisted that it represented the public interest while its opponents represented “special” or “selfish” interests, and no entity would be cast in the role of special interest more consistently than the amorphous “downtown.”3 Again the Islais Creek story provides examples of the discursive strategy. When George Center felt that one of the opponents of the harbor misrepresented his positions, he blamed the person in question, H.  L.  Stoddard, but he also blamed a set of institutions: the “downtown commercial associations.”4 In a heated moment, Center vituperated that the downtown groups were so consistently selfish, dishonest, and anathema to the public interest “that they must die, for they are not worth a cent, the whole kit of them. No decent man will join them.”5 Center was referring to some combination of the Merchants’ Association, Downtown Association, Merchants’ Exchange, and Chamber of Commerce. Collectively, these organizations represented all of San Francisco’s major banks, department stores, shipping companies, and real estate firms. In 1911, all of these entities would formally merge into the San Francisco Chamber of Com-

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merce.6 However, a survey of the press in the 1910s shows that each maintained an independent identity, in some form or other, after the merger. Center’s remark—that “no decent man will join” the downtown associations—might at first seem curious, since many leaders of the MPA belonged to those same groups. Rolph himself served as the president of the Merchants’ Exchange and as a trustee of the Chamber of Commerce.7 When speaking for the MPA, Sullivan attacked the Burnham plan on the grounds that it was designed to benefit downtown property owners; however, Sullivan was also a signatory to a letter from the Down Town Property Owners’ Association, which opposed the Burnham plan on the grounds that it was designed to benefit manufacturers.8 Staking out both of these positions simultaneously may seem hypocritical, but only one if one assumes that the MPA or the downtown associations conferred (or imposed) an exclusive identity upon its members. Both improvement clubs and downtown organizations had porous boundaries, institutionally speaking. Part of the purpose of founding these kinds of groups seems to have been precisely to give their members more latitude, more authority to speak in circumstances where they would not otherwise have had standing to participate. Having membership in both the MPA and the downtown association enabled Sullivan to oppose the Burnham plan from as many institutional positions as possible. There is no evidence that anyone even thought it strange that Sullivan would attack downtown while speaking for the Mission, then turn around and attack manufacturers while speaking for downtown. Both of these moves were in the service of an overarching goal—to stop the Burnham plan—and the specter of “downtown” here served Sullivan as a convenient bugaboo, and not much more. That is not to say that affiliations with civic groups were capricious or unimportant, but that the strength of the affiliation depended upon the issue at hand. So Rolph and Sullivan were perfectly happy to speak as members of the Chamber of Commerce when that body was helping to plan the Panama Pacific Exposition of 1915, but they bitterly attacked it in 1916 for its open-shop campaign. These were not contradictory positions. It is worth noting, however, that many members and even leaders of the various downtown clubs would sometimes come out against their own associations. The same cannot be said of the leadership of the MPA, which never betrayed a hint of internal dissent, or at least none that registered in the press, supervisors’ chambers, or even private correspondence that has made its way into the archive. But if the relatively small leadership of the MPA felt a deeper allegiance to that organization, they still recognized that they

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shared many interests with the downtown clubs. The two sides might often battle over issues like the expansion of port facilities to the south, but they were natural allies when it came to other issues, like home industry. Center’s outburst was only one of many moments when antipathy between the MPA and the downtown associations seemed to call into question whether the two sides would ever be able to collaborate on anything. It was this concern that drove the decision to declare a formal truce in 1909. To commemorate the arrangement, the MPA’s “Father Crowley released a white dove at the corner of Van Ness and Market streets,” at the boundary between the two neighborhoods.9 Speaking for the MPA, and not the Downtown Association, Rolph presented a cup that was inscribed “United we stand for San Francisco” to W. D. Fennimore, president of the downtown group. Fennimore expressed the hope that “each organization could work in its own district without the intrusion of petty jealousies.”10 That such a statement was necessary to begin with testifies to the depth of the animosity. After the formal truce was declared, the MPA did find some success in minding its own business—and even collaborating with the Chamber of Commerce on occasion—but the association more often found it useful to cast “downtown” as a special interest. It was the MPA that inaugurated the narrative of the scrappy Mission taking on the behemoth of downtown; it was a narrative that would prove remarkably durable, and that still has currency today. The MPA’s discursive strategy of defining itself against a downtown other proved effective, but it was only one of many cultural strategies that the association mobilized to create a sense of solidarity, to encourage people to recognize that there was such a thing as “the Mission” to begin with, and that to believe that it was an identity to proud of. The MPA, Mission Merchants’ Association, and their allies also proved successful at cultivating a cultural politics of labor, and at enlisting the visual language of architecture. Both of these key strategies had explicitly racial and ethnic dimensions, and both relied on a nostalgic historical imagination.

The Romance of the Spanish Past As the home of the city’s oldest structure, the Mission District had some architectural patrimony to contend with. Historians have demonstrated that in the late nineteenth century, San Francisco elites felt anxiety about their city’s reputation among easterners as a barbarous, corrupt, and foreign place.11 The Mission Dolores was one site where such anxieties found spatial expression. In the early American period of the 1850s, all of the ran-

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cho lands surrounding the Mission were squatted by settlers from Europe and the eastern United States. American courts did not uphold the Mexican government’s land grants, and by the 1860s the few people who lived in these areas were almost exclusively white.12 Yet even without a nonwhite population to speak of, neighborhood groups and institutions were eager to assert their Anglo-American identity. This desire was discernible in the church that was erected not fifteen feet from the original Mission in 1884. In the late nineteenth century, the Mission parish church had begun to attract parishioners from the highest rungs of Catholic Society in San Francisco, including James Phelan.13 Catering to its new parishioners, the Church erected an Anglo Gothic revival structure that announced its ascendancy by towering over the more humble building14 (fig. 4.1). The Spreckels mansion (1887) on Howard and Twenty-First Streets was built in the Victorian stick style that was also popular in the east at the time. Indeed, everything built in the Mission during the late nineteenth century simply ignored the area’s architectural heritage.

Figure 4.1. Mission Dolores in 1884. Left: original building; right: Anglo Gothic structure. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, photo ID number AAB-0679.

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The old Mission’s status as an object of both indifference and Anglo racial anxiety was perhaps best illustrated by the works of Bret Harte. Writing in 1896, Harte referred to the Mission Dolores as “those queer little adobe buildings with tiled roofs,” but he also ruminated that the Mission Dolores is destined to be “The Last Sigh” of the native Californian [meaning Mexican]. When the last “Greaser” shall indolently give way to the bustling Yankee, I can imagine he will, like the Moorish king, ascend one of the Mission hills to take his last lingering look at the hilled city. For a long time he will cling tenaciously to Pacific Street. He will delve into the rocky fastness of Telegraph Hill until progress shall remove it. He will haunt Vallejo Street, and those back slums which so vividly typify the degradation of a people; but he will eventually make way for improvement. The Mission will be last to drop from his nerveless fingers.15

Even though Harte had already written the Mission’s eulogy in the 1890s, by the time of his death in 1902, a new generation of San Franciscans had begun to breathe new life into the structure. Prominent citizens seemed to feel it was safe to memorialize the neighborhood’s Spanish heritage. Perhaps this was because there was now more than half a century between the present and the city’s Mexican and Spanish periods, with the United States having recently vanquished the Spanish military in the Philippines. Add to all of this the fact that there were no Latinos living in the area, and the anxiety about the Spanish past might itself have seemed quaint. In the years that followed the disaster of 1906, the Mission would become a centerpiece in San Franciscans’ cultural contest with the eastern United States. A novella titled The Lure of San Francisco: A Romance amid Old Landmarks, published in 1915 in anticipation of the Panama-Pacific Exposition, provides an excellent example of how the Mission was deployed in this contest. The protagonist, a young San Francisco–born woman, takes her eastern suitor on a daylong tour of the city. In the morning he regards San Francisco as brash and unrefined. But after visiting the Mission, the Presidio, and a handful of other sites, he is convinced that he was mistaken and resolves at the end of the day to move to San Francisco to marry his guide. In their preface, authors Elizabeth Gray Potter and Mabel Thayer Gray wrote that they offered “this little book” as a “suggestion to the casual visitor that we [San Francisco] are entitled to the dignity of age.”16 Like the United States, the Mission was founded in 1776 and was every bit as American as the Liberty Bell, the reasoning seemed to go. The Mis-

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sion Dolores was central not only to the authors’ claim to venerability but also to a claim on a Euro-American identity that was at once newer and older, and perhaps, in their view, improved over its eastern variant. While at the Mission itself, the protagonist confronts her East Coast suitor: “At the time when you New Englanders were pushing the Indians farther and farther into the wilderness, killing and capturing them, we Californians were drawing them to our missions with gifts and friendship. While you were leaving them in ignorance we were teaching them—” He stooped to get a full look at my eyes. “I never knew a Spaniard to have eyes the color of violets. Look up your family tree, my dear enthusiast, and I think you will find that you are we.” “I’m not,” I declared indignantly. “I’m a Californian. I was born here and even if I haven’t Spanish blood in my veins, I have the spirit of the old padres.”17

This common sentiment might be described as a variation on a phenomenon that Renato Rosaldo termed “imperialist nostalgia,” or a feeling of nostalgia for a culture that one has participated in destroying through colonization18—the variation here being that the culture that was destroyed through imperialist practices was itself imperialist. Like many Californians, the novel’s protagonist was not mourning the passing of the savage-yetnoble Yelamu people; rather, she was identifying with a more venerable, nobler European imperialism. The cultural politics of Spanishness was given a stage in San Francisco’s 1909 Portolá Festival, an event that was officially organized by the Downtown Merchants’ Association but chaired by James Rolph.19 (Newspaper coverage of the event often identified Rolph as the president of both the Downtown Association and the MPA.20) The idea was to celebrate the city’s recovery from the disaster of 1906 by commemorating the discovery of San Francisco Bay by Gaspar de Portolá in 1769. The Spanish tropes were liberally mixed with references to Americanness. As one promotional pamphlet put it, “no city in the world represents the true American spirit more than San Francisco.”21 This was essentially the message that President Taft delivered in his toast at the opening of the festival. The imagery that appeared in the promotional materials prominently featured the figure of the sultry señorita—sitting before Spanish buildings, embracing a bear (the state animal of California) before a sunset (fig. 4.2). One promotional image from California’s 1925 Diamond Jubilee was exceptionally economical; it

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Figure 4.2. Two expressions of the Californian señorita visual trope. Portolá Festival letterheavd, box 60, folder 29, Phelan Papers, Bancroft Library; personal collection of John Freeman.

showed an Anglo woman, dressed as a señorita, walking with a Californian bear, in front of a Spanish-style building that was flying an American flag (color plate 3). In December 1909 the Mission Merchants’ Association and the MPA put on their own weeklong celebration, the Mission Carnival, for the express purpose of challenging the citywide Portolá Festival.22 The Chronicle reported that the Mission “has accumulated a third more population than it had before the fire, has increased its business many fold, that new, handsome buildings for the uses of business concerns are being erected on nearly every corner.” For those reasons, “its progressive merchants have

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determined to maneuver their own observance.”23 Illustrating once again the way in which leaders of civic groups moved easily between positions that might at first appear contradictory, this celebration, too, was organized largely by Rolph. So, Rolph put on the citywide Portolá Festival in October, then put on the Mission Carnival to challenge that festival in December. The Mission Carnival, also often billed as the “Mission Fiesta,” competed with the citywide event on two levels.24 As with many of the MPA’s campaigns, this event aimed to challenge the commercial ascendency of downtown. The position was that the Mission was no longer a suburb of downtown San Francisco—it was now a city within a city. D. O. Crowley gave a speech titled “Unity in the Mission District,” while Churchill stated that the goal was “to show all the people residing south of Ninth Street that our merchants are able to meet all their needs.”25 The MPA fought for improvements in all these outlying areas—“the Mission District proper”— because its leaders regarded them as a commercial hinterland. The MPA’s strategy was to deliver not only infrastructure but also a cultural identity. With its heavily Spanish-themed programming, the fiesta aimed to contest the larger city’s right to proclaim its Spanishness. That identity belonged firstly to the Mission. While residents had long ignored or even denied the area’s history, the neighborhood’s new leaders now celebrated the Mission as the wellspring of Spanishness in San Francisco. The changing sentiment about the area’s heritage also found architectural expression. In turn-of-the-century San Francisco, civic-minded businesspeople like Phelan had tended to favor a Beaux-Arts style of architecture, which was best illustrated by the Burnham plan. Having helped to the defeat the plan in 1906, the MPA not only helped to turn back a centralization of planning power but also a totalizing, neoclassical aesthetic vision for San Francisco. In the Burnham plan, the MPA had been forced to contend with an outstanding example of how architecture could be mobilized to communicate civic identity. Now that the association’s leaders had succeeded in asserting that the Mission constituted its own public, with its own character, they were faced with the question of how they would represent that character in physical space. As the home to the Mission Dolores, the neighborhood had an appropriate design language right at its doorstep, and local boosters seemed to feel that they did in fact have a special claim to the mission style. This architectural language not only gave the Mission District a visual tool to distinguish itself from the commercial districts downtown and on Fillmore Street; it also served to remind San Franciscans and visitors that the Mission was the city’s oldest inhabited neighborhood. The architecture thereby also symbolically supported the

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neighborhood’s claim to the spoils of paternity, which included municipal investment in physical improvements. After the Gothic Mission Dolores was badly damaged in the earthquake of 1906, the church was rebuilt in an Andalucian architectural idiom, though the church had served a predominantly Irish congregation for decades. (Compare figs. 4.1 and 4.3.) Promoting a fanciful vision of Spanish heritage, the design was amended with Churrigueresque flourishes in 191326 (fig. 4.4). In 1918, Willis Polk was brought in to restore the original Mission.27 The Mission architectural vocabulary was employed in buildings both civic and commercial throughout the neighborhood in the 1910s and 1920s, including the new high school and the 3,100-seat El Capitan on Mission Street, the “biggest movie house west of Chicago when it was built in 1928.”28 (See figs. 4.5 and fig. 4.6, top.) More sober versions of this nostalgic tableau appeared in some of the neighborhood’s municipal buildings, most notably the Carnegie-funded Mission Branch Library, designed by G. Albert Lansburgh. In describing the library as “Spanish,” the 1915–16 San Francisco Municipal Report pointed to the eaves, which were

Figure 4.3. Post-quake reconstruction of Mission Dolores in Andalucian idiom. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, photo ID number AAB-0638.

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Figure 4.4. A 1929 photograph of Mission Dolores complex, showing Churrigueresque amendments. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, photo ID number AAB-0474.

“covered with red Mission tiles”29 (fig. 4.6, bottom). Aside from this telltale detail, however, the building was a standard piece of neoclassical design, a Palladian palazzo, complete with a frieze reading “Mission Branch of the San Francisco Public Library” in roman font. Though the Mission Bank was “Grecian” in design, the Mission Savings Bank, which was located only a

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Figure 4.5. A 1933 photograph of El Capitan, San Francisco’s largest movie theater, which opened in 1928. It was designed by W. H. Crim and Albert Lansburgh, the architect of the Mission Library. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, photo ID number AAA-8643.

block away and whose MPA-affiliated leadership was almost identical, employed a decidedly Spanish vocabulary, complete with scalloped parapets that seemed to have been borrowed directly from the California Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.30 (See fig. 1.4.) The local ethnic institutions also participated in this trend. In its original articulation,

Figure 4.6. Top: A 1926 photograph of Mission High School; bottom: undated photograph of Mission Branch Library, built in 1915, designed by Albert Lansburgh. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, photo ID numbers AAB-0389 and AAC-5677.

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the Turn Verein Hall, built in 1910 on Eighteenth Street, closely resembled the Mission Savings Bank, with its scalloped parapets and red-tiled eaves.31 (The structure is today well-known as the Women’s Building.) Here was a German-heritage cultural institution that represented itself in Spanish architecture. The Danish Methodist Episcopal church on Seventeenth Street was also built in a Spanish colonial architectural idiom after the disaster. Examples abound. But the fact that Spanish architecture had become a booster’s promotional device was perhaps most clearly illustrated in the design of the MPA’s hall (fig. 4.7), which opened in 1908, less than a block from the Mission Bank and the Mission Savings Bank.32 The Call reported that the “front is treated in the mission style; the plaster, rich dark brown trimmings and the Spanish red tiles on the roof making a very effective color scheme.”33 Inside, a quarter-size replica of the facade of the Mission Dolores was mounted to the wall above the speakers’ table (fig. 4.8). The National Guard armory on Mission Street also provides an excellent case study of the MPA’s architectural imagination, as well as an illustration of just how seriously the association took design. In the early twentieth century, armories were still elite social clubs, symbols of prestige,

Figure 4.7. Headquarters of the MPA, constructed in 1908. MPA, “Constitution and By-laws,” 1909, Mission Promotion Association file. Courtesy of California Historical Society, CHS2013.1277.

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Figure 4.8. Interior of MPA hall at 1908 banquet, showing quarter-size replica of the Mission Dolores above the speakers’ table. Photograph by R. J. Waters. Mission District file, photograph collection. Courtesy of California Historical Society, CHS2013.1279.

more than they were strategic military assets. The convention on the East Coast at the time was still to site armories in “the most fashionable neighborhoods possible.”34 The MPA’s armory campaign was an attempt to bring architectural and social distinction to the Mission, and to boost real estate values, but it was also an attempt to symbolically establish the Mission as a site of civic power. Though most aspects of the Burnham plan had been rejected in 1906, a version of Burnham’s Civic Center was still under discussion in 1910. The armory is a mile from where the Civic Center was finally built in 1915, but in Burnham’s original plan (fig. 4.9), the armory sat on a place at the terminus of a new Mission Boulevard, on axis with the Civic Center, with a “three-fold thoroughfare formed by Mission, Capp, and Howard Streets” extending to the south.35 While the grand, arcaded thoroughfare had been abandoned by 1910, the MPA put forward an alternative plan to connect Mission Street with Market Street, “bringing it into connection with the Civic Center.”36 This plan replaced the large place at Mission and Fourteenth with a plaza at Mission and Thirteenth that would have framed the

Figure 4.9. Burnham’s plan for a civic center. A superimposed white X indicates the would-be site of the armory. Daniel H. Burnham, Report on a Plan for San Francisco (San Francisco: Sunset Press, 1905).

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armory, maintaining some of the visual drama of Burnham’s axial connection to the Civic Center.37 So while the MPA fought the post-quake effort to implement the Burnham plan on the grounds that it was designed to benefit downtown property owners, the association pushed forward on those aspects of Burnham’s vision that would monumentalize the Mission, symbolically tying the neighborhood into the center of San Francisco power. The armory episode illustrates many key characteristics of the MPA, including its political aspirations, its vision for the Mission District, its real power in the city and the state, the depth of its leaders’ commitment to architecture, and their willingness to wield the association’s power in the service of representational ends. Having already impressed upon the California state engineer, M. F. McClure, that they expected the design of the armory itself to tie in visually with the Civic Center, the leaders of the MPA publicly confronted the state in 1912 when it proposed a design that was not to the association’s liking.38 Under McClure’s direction, the state architect—John Woollett, of the firm Woollett and Woollett—proposed an austere building, in keeping with the idea of a military function.39 In a meeting at city hall, the adjutant general, E. A. Forbes, and state attorney Webb indicated that they were “inclined to support the Woollett plan.” No image of this initial design made it into any public repository (including the records of the California Department of General Services), but Matt Sullivan painted a vivid picture when he “declared that the big brick structure prepared by Woollett looked like a carbarn.” When Forbes and Webb argued that work was already under way, Sullivan responded with a direct challenge to the authority of the state: Sullivan announced “that the contract already let by the State Engineer’s office for the foundations of the armory was not worth the paper it was written on.”40 The fine-grain detail of how this confrontation played out has not made it into the historical record, either, but the result was that the state relented and the San Francisco city architect, John Galen Howard, was brought in—at the behest of the MPA—to collaborate with Woollett and Woollett. Less than two weeks later, state architect Woollett came back with a design that he described as a Spanish/Moorish fortress. (See fig. 4.10.) The more decorative scheme—with clinker bricks, turrets, and terra-cotta medallions—provoked a sarcastic response from some critics. A Call article, subtitled “Architectural Frills Cause the Armory Plans to Assume Acceptable Form,” called the new building “a little more frolicsome, as befits the rigorous service of the National Guard of California.”41 But the opinion that mattered was that of the MPA. The Call reported that the adjutant general again signaled that he “was inclined to favor the [previous design’s]

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Figure 4.10. Armory between its construction in 1914 and installation of the barrel vault over the drill court in 1926. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, photo ID number AAF-0567.

warlike front, but he capitulated” when “J. B. Zimdars, for the Mission Promotion Association, declared that everybody in the Mission would be pleased with the changed plans.”42 It mattered not only that the Mission get the armory, and the investment that came with it, but that the armory communicate what the MPA wanted it to. The MPA’s ambitions were much larger than any single building or collection of buildings. In fact, the MPA would not only support attempts to rescue those elements of the Burnham plan that would monumentalize the Mission, but it also put forward its own radically transformative plan for San Francisco roadways, a comprehensive redesign that amounted to a Mission-centric revival of Burnham’s basic ideas. The Chronicle reported in 1910 that a scheme which is designed to give the city a grand system of continuous boulevards affording driveways practically about most of the city county, will be proposed and advocated by the Mission Promotion Association. This project contemplates wide roadways across the Mission district to connect with the ocean beach, and thence across the city to the panhandle of Golden Gate Park.43

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More roads still were proposed, all of which radiated outward from the Mission District. No visual representation of this plan has survived, but the descriptions make it clear that the ideas about circulation, and the general urbanistic sensibilities, issue directly from Burnham. The difference was that instead of having the Civic Center serve as the hub from which the spokes radiated, here the Mission would become the center of the circulatory system, the geographical and symbolic heart of San Francisco. This plan was only appropriate since, as Churchill put it, the “general outlook in the district may be said to give indisputable proof that at the present rate of progress the center of Greater San Francisco is rapidly converging about the heart of the Mission, where the city was founded.”44 The MPA’s spatial and historical narratives merged in its roadway plan. The improvement clubs were not the only entities that were attuned to the ways in which aesthetic, spatial, and ethnic ideologies might be mobilized to help create solidarity, a coherent identity. In order to explain exactly how these ideologies were communicated, and what they meant for labor’s relationships to the MPA, the business community, and government, it is necessary to present some background on the Asiatic exclusion movement and its local expressions in the Mission District.

White Man’s Territory: Race, Space, and the Boundaries of Publicness In the early twentieth century, San Francisco’s labor unions were as powerful as any in the country. Their strength was largely due to the fact that any employer wishing to bring in strikebreakers would have to look across the Pacific Ocean to find them. Because employers sometimes did just that, San Francisco labor was extremely hostile to Asian immigration. The Asiatic exclusion movement began in earnest during the economic slump of the 1870s. With support from white Californians of all classes, workers led a campaign that culminated in the federal Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), which barred all unskilled and most skilled Chinese workers from entering the country. After being extended in 1888 and 1892, the restrictions were made permanent in 1902.45 These laws resulted in a more than 50 percent decrease in the Chinese population of San Francisco, from twenty-six thousand in 1890 to eleven thousand in 1910.46 Though the exclusion movement began by focusing on Chinese workers, it soon extended to Japanese immigrants. This development ensured that California nativists would be a thorn in the side of President Theodore Roosevelt, who wished to establish friendly relations with Japan. After

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the San Francisco school board declared that it would segregate Japanese students in 1906, the Roosevelt administration brokered the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan. The United States agreed to end legal discrimination against Japanese living in America, and Japan agreed to stop issuing passports to Japanese workers wishing to emigrate to the United States. The nativists, however, were not appeased. With significant support from Progressive politicians, their lobbying efforts resulted in the Immigration Act of 1924, which effectively broke the Gentlemen’s Agreement and further extended immigration restrictions to all Asian countries.47 After the disaster of 1906, the Asiatic exclusion movement was led, in no small part, out of the Mission District. The present study is concerned less with the broader movement than with its most local expressions within the social and physical spaces of the Mission.48 Scholars have pointed out that the principal difference between Jim Crow laws and Asiatic exclusion laws was that the former mandated segregation while the latter mandated outright exclusion and deportation.49 But anti-Asiatic legislation was not confined to the federal exclusion laws. A variety of municipal laws, in combination with racist cultural practices, created an environment in which the Asian experience in San Francisco was comparable to everyday life under Jim Crow. Sanborn fire insurance maps show a handful of structures marked as “Chinese laundries” in the Mission; oral histories and personal memoirs confirm that there was a small Chinese presence in the neighborhood. But while they may have been present, anyone of Asian descent living in the Mission would likely have understood that they were not members of the public. Among the groups most responsible for communicating this message were the Asiatic Exclusion League and the Anti-Jap Laundry League. Both of these protective labor associations were founded in the Mission (in 1905 and 1908, respectively) with the sponsorship of the neighborhood’s unions, particularly the BTC, and both held their regular meetings in the Mission’s labor temples and union halls.50 These organizations believed that Asian labor threatened depressed wages, the open shop, and the dislodging of union power. The principal demand of the Exclusion League was that Japanese and Koreans be covered by the 1882 Exclusion Act. The Anti-Jap Laundry League was also organized around what it called an “unalterable opposition to Asiatic immigration, occupation and competition upon the white man’s territory.”51 In San Francisco, the influence of the Asiatic exclusion lobby was so powerful that even the internationalist wing of the labor movement supported it. As a San Francisco socialist leader named Cameron King wrote, “Our feelings of brotherhood toward the Jap-

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anese must wait until we have no longer reason to look upon them as an inflowing horde of alien scabs.”52 Labor was unanimous in its support for exclusion, but the movement could also count on broader support. True as ever to its political allies, in 1909 the MPA issued a statement formally endorsing “Japanese expulsion and exclusion from the entire Pacific coast.  .  .  . A further resolution calling upon the residents of the Mission district not to patronize Japanese laundries was also passed.”53 The Anti-Jap Laundry League was delighted to have “secured the attention and interest of the largest and most influential improvement club in this city, the Mission Promotion Association.”54 The MPA’s support here was largely symbolic—the association offered supportive statements but did no campaigning on behalf of exclusion, as it had for other labor-friendly movements like home industry. But the formal support of the MPA was still significant since every indication suggests that its founder, Mayor Rolph, did not personally support Asiatic exclusion. As the owner of a shipping business, Rolph had a clear interest in maintaining good relations with Asian countries. In fact, Rolph—whose slogan was “make no enemies”—had a record of promoting more egalitarian race relations in other contexts, too. A string of 1924 correspondence, for example, shows that Rolph was vehemently opposed to discrimination against blacks. After receiving a report of a park attendant who ejected “two adult colored people and two children” from a public restroom, telling them that “the ‘niggers’ were not allowed,” Rolph demanded the attendant’s job. When the Park Commission secretary, Captain Lamb, suggested that the employee be disciplined instead, Rolph persisted.55 One Japanese San Franciscan remarked around this time that the mayor “wasn’t against” immigrants from Asia: “He wasn’t against anyone.”56 By the 1920s, when labor’s power was diminished, Rolph’s lack of personal antipathy toward the city’s Asian population was more manifest. In 1926, he served as the pallbearer at the funeral of George Shima, a prominent Japanese agri-businessman who had led a well-publicized campaign against Asiatic exclusion legislation.57 In his reelection campaign of 1927, Rolph regularly spoke to large crowds in Chinatown, promising to bring improvements to that neighborhood.58 But if Rolph was not personally willing to make enemies of the city’s racial and ethnic minorities, nor was he willing to interfere with his union allies in the Mission—at least not during the period of their greatest strength. Phelan, on the other hand, vocally and consistently supported the unions on this subject, as well as on the subject of home industry. Phelan himself was a leader of the anti-immigration movement, both as mayor

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(1897–1902) and as a U.S. senator (1915–21). In the wake of Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, Phelan and other California Progressives feared that Japan had imperial ambitions on so-called white lands and that the Pacific Coast was next.59 Phelan was also concerned that the Japanese who were buying up farmland in the valleys were thereby discouraging the immigration of Anglos from the East Coast to California.60 With unwavering support from labor, Phelan loudly called for Asiatic exclusion legislation, as well as the Alien Poll Tax (California, 1921) and the Alien Land Laws (California, 1913 and 1920).61 These latter were themselves a set of legal mechanisms that used space to restrict access to the category of publicness by barring “aliens ineligible to citizenship” from owning property—and the only aliens ineligible for citizenship were Asians. Phelan’s 1920 senate reelection campaign revolved around the slogan “Keep California White.” Figure 4.11 shows a campaign poster in which the hand of Uncle Sam is arresting a Japanese hand grasping for a map of California. The text reads “Re-elect James D. Phelan U.S. Senator and let him Finish the work he now has under way to stop the Silent Invasion.”62 Phelan’s reelection bid failed, but California’s new Alien Land Law did pass in 1920. Mission residents were constantly exposed to posters, handbills, and other ephemera from the “educational” campaigns of supporters of Asiatic exclusion. The Anti-Jap Laundry League explained that because its “crusade” was “mainly educational in character we endeavor through the medium of publicity to enlighten our people upon the dangers of fostering Asiatic competition. For this purpose we often resort to outdoor advertising,” including billboards, broadsides, handbills, circulars, and newspaper advertisements.63 These advertising campaigns were liable to bring the league into conflict with downtown business interests, as the years leading up to San Francisco’s 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition illustrated. When some of its outdoor advertising was covered or removed, the league charged that “Large Interests,” fearing the potential for scaring off tourism, had been responsible. In a letter to the SFLC, the league stated: To us it is quite evident that a coterie of financiers, shielded behind the Exposition ensign, has arrogated to themselves the rights of sitting in the high places of censorship and battering down any public movement not coinciding with their predatory activities. . . . Let it be borne in mind that this Exposition project is not being fathered exclusively by any priveleged [sic] class. It is the offspring of the general public. Labor Unions, fraternal societies, small business concerns and individuals are mainly shouldering its financial bur-

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Figure 4.11. Senator Phelan 1920 reelection campaign poster. Library of Congress.

dens, and its success can alone be assured when the grasping propensities of designing groups are rigorously curbed. If the supporting of the Fair carries with it the bartering away of the Caucasians’ rights to fight for the maintenance of the white man’s standard through organized endeavor; then indeed have we purchased a dubious prize at a fearful sacrifice.64

For the league, as for the MPA, labor unions and small business concerns represented the public. “Designing groups,” here, referred not only to Asians but also to those entities that MPA leaders often referred to collec-

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tively as “downtown”: city fathers, financiers, large interests. The league was careful not to name Rolph, who chaired the Panama Pacific Expo Commission, but who also was a friend to labor on most issues. For the league, both Asiatics and large businesses were a menace to the public interest, and the league often collapsed the two into a single entity. For example, it often described the so-called Japanese threat as the threat of monopoly.65 Japanese and downtown were both perceived as dangers to the public interest because they were also seen as dangers to the economic prosperity of unionists and local businesses—particularly the residents and merchants of the Mission. The league’s offices were originally in the Building Trades Temple, but they moved to the Anglo Building, on Sixteenth and Howard Streets, in 1910. The Anglo Building was so named because it was owned by the Anglo-California Bank, but the league clearly traded on this coincidence in its print products, often putting its address in a larger font than was typical of political materials. These materials exhibit many features that are of interest for the study of race in the American West. Not least was the league’s tendency to collapse all Asian people, including South Asians (or “hindoos”), into a single category. Asiatic was not the only catchall term; curiously, terms like Jap, Chinese, or Mongolian were often used to refer to all people of Asian descent. But the feature that is most pertinent to the present study is the intersection between the league’s spatial imagination and the manner in which it defined the boundaries of a white public in terms of economic interests. One typical broadside challenged the patron of “Jap Laundries” to consider the “the injury you are inflicting upon your white brothers and sisters by forcing them from the employment that rightfully belongs to them.”66 Another bill admonished that “you are also advertising the Jap—for a Japanese laundry wagon at your door means that others, seeing your example, may be inclined to follow it.”67 “Is it not suicidal policy,” yet another handbill demanded, “to encourage, for the sake of saving a few cents per week, Oriental competition that no Caucasian can meet unless he relinquishes those standards of civilization that are the white man’s inheritance upon the white man’s soil?”68 Here, as elsewhere in the league’s publications, the white man’s lengthier presence in California rendered it his “soil,” “territory,” or “country.” And from that soil, the white man derived a right to a higher standard of living. An ad that appeared regularly in the Labor Clarion in the early 1910s directed the Anglo public to “Patronize These Union White Labor Steam Laundries.” Below this enjoinder appeared a list of

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eight establishments, six of which were located in the Mission. With its major labor councils and protective associations located in the neighborhood, the Mission must have seemed the very heart of the white man’s territory. As part of its strategy to protect that territory, the Anti-Jap Laundry League portrayed Asian-owned business as a foreign intrusion, sometimes in militarized terms (as in “invading hordes”) and sometimes in medicalized terms. A representative item from the latter category was a 1910 handbill titled “Men and Women! Protect Your Homes from Loathsome Oriental Diseases!” The presumption implicit here—and explicit elsewhere in league publications—was that Orientals were a different species, carrying diseases that did not, under natural circumstances, afflict whites. Quoting a Health Department report, the bill charged that the laundries were “encrusted with filth and dirt . . . breeding rats and vermin, all of which creates an unsanitary condition that is a nuisance and a menace to life and health.”69 The bill concluded by asking the Anglo public: “Are you willing, for the purpose of saving a few cents per week, to endanger the health of yourself and those near and dear to you? Shun the Japanese Laundries. They are the breeding places of Oriental Diseases.”70 The perceived dangers of proximity—the threat to the near and dear—figured prominently in the rhetorical and visual strategies of the league. Following through this logic, one league poster recommended “Industrial Segregation” as a means of ensuring peace with Japan.71 In its internal reports, the league described its own use of the public health argument as a strategy; but the real threat posed by proximity, the threat that animated the league, was an economic one.72 This motivation was crystallized in a 1910 handbill, subtitled “The Cause and Effect”73 (fig 4.12). One of two adjacent industrial buildings is occupied by a “Jap Laundry,” with darkened windows, bustling with men wearing traditional Japanese clothing. The other building had recently been occupied by a “White Laundry” but now stands vacant, with several “To Let” signs in the windows; white female laundry workers idle on the street, wearing hats and bustled dresses that signal Victorian domestic respectability.74 In the visual economy of the league, “the white man’s territory” was a local market for services; the “invasion” of that territory by a “Jap Laundry” resulted in unemployment among whites and in the failure of an adjoining white business. The threat of proximity was a threat to white prosperity. The league’s activities were not confined to the representations associated with their educational campaigns. By its own reckoning, the Laundry League was at least as influential as the Exclusion League in lobbying the

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Figure 4.12. Anti-Jap Laundry League handbill, 1910. California ephemera collection, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

state government on legislation pertaining to immigration, land ownership, and voting rights.75 Within the city of San Francisco, the league effectively lobbied the Public Health Department to investigate businesses owned by, or employing, Asians. In addition to laundries, the businesses included machine shops, department stores, and the Southern Pacific, among others.76 In 1911, the Board of Supervisors received twenty-nine applications from Asian businesspeople for permits to operate a laundry; the league claimed some credit for the fact that the supervisors denied all of these applications except for the four that were to be located in Chinatown—where Chinese could be safely segregated.77 Considering that it did much to influence the commercial geography of the city, the Anti-Jap Laundry League might usefully be described as a planning lobby. As part of its strategy to deal with existing laundries throughout the city, the league also pushed for passage and enforcement of a local ordinance making “it unlawful for the operation of a public laundry or wash house between the hours of 6 p.m. and 7 a.m., or on any portion of that day known as Sunday. It provides that no work shall be done on clothes during these hours.”78 From the league’s perspective, any labor done during “non-working hours” constituted unfair competition because it drove prices lower. This competition, in turn, would undermine the campaign for the eight-hour workday. In order to ensure that “the Chinese laundrymen be forced to compete upon a near equality with white laundrymen,” the

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law “provides also that all windows in laundries that open on any public thoroughfare shall permit of an unobstructed view of the interior of said buildings during the hours within which work is prohibited. The use of shutter, blinds, shades or other covering that fill the entire window space is strictly prohibited.” Considering that the league regularly advertised that “Japs eat, sleep, drink, and smoke in the same room in which your laundry work is done,” it is clear that this law was also intended to make domestic life uncomfortable for anyone operating such a business.79 In addition to their legal and educational campaigns, the league engaged in other activities that no doubt constituted physical harassment. Members of the league conducted their own spot checks of laundries at night—looking into people’s windows—and reported violations of the Unobstructed View law to the police. In 1911, the league reported that it regularly followed Asian laundry workers to document the details of their operations. Because one of these laundries had purchased an automobile, and because all the others had adopted tactics “to elude our trailers,” the league had found it economically wise to purchase a motorcycle rather than run up large bills for “buggy hires.”80 Such an investment demonstrates how central these tactics were to the league’s operations.81 While Chinese living in the Mission could expect to be harassed by the Anti-Jap Laundry League, they also had to contend with neighborhood children. In the 1970s Frederick Wirt conducted interviews of people who had grown up in the Mission in the early part of the twentieth century. Two of the interviewees, in separate sessions, recalled that children in the neighborhood would “torment” the laundrymen. A resident named William Bauer recalled that “there was lots of rocks in those days, you know, the size of your fist, baseball size, and they’d throw them at the poor Chinaman as he’d go along in his wagon. He’d go like the dickens.”82 Bauer explicitly stated that he “never participated in this.” Another “Mission Boy” named William Dunne also expressed chagrin about the practice, though it is less clear whether or not he participated: The Chinese were not only badly treated by what we call the coolie labor working on the railroads, but when they ran those laundries, they were the laundry people of San Francisco. And as growing up youngsters, I think it was disgraceful that our parents didn’t do something, but they seemed to tolerate it. The kids would throw rocks at their laundry, break windows, things like that, just to see, they’d keep their distances and see these Chinese come out and chase them and run. They didn’t know how to handle it. They never appealed to the police.83

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Considering the “educational” activities of neighborhood institutions like the Anti-Jap Laundry League and the Asiatic Exclusion League, which portrayed all Asians as “scheming” invaders, it may be easier to understand why adults in the neighborhood condoned these violent and humiliating practices. As Dunne noted, the Chinese residents of the Mission never appealed to the police. An unpublished memoir titled “Growing Up in the Mission,” by Frank Quinn, provides evidence that any such appeals would have been in vain, in any case. As a child in the 1920s, Quinn played the “Chinese lottery”; his father, who referred to the lottery as the “Hong Kong Derby,” was also an avid player.84 According to Quinn, “Chinese lottery was usually played in the rear of a Chinese laundry. I knew of two in my immediate neighborhood. The one I patronized was on Twenty-Fourth Street. This particular laundry was situated on the corner of an alley. Its back door was on the alley.”85 As Quinn recounts, there were risks involved in this illegal betting: Every once in a while the police would raid the laundry and cart the Chinese gamblers and patrons to the police station. My father was once caught in such a raid. He, the customers, the proprietors and the assistants were given a free ride in the Black Maria [a police wagon] to Mission Police Station on 17th Street. In such a situation the Chinese proprietor would make a hurried telephone call to his attorney who would arrive promptly and post bail. The customers were released for ten dollars. Bail was always forfeited. No one ever dreamed of showing up for trial. It was a free and easy age. My father regarded his arrest as being nothing more than a humorous incident in his life.86

The white gambler was in the position to recall these run-ins with police wistfully, as a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Since the bettors’ bail was apparently paid by the laundrymen, the consequences were limited. Chinese laundries were a presence in the Mission, but that presence was tolerated only on certain conditions. Many white workingmen apparently accepted them because they serviced a vice industry. But it was understood by the laundries, the bettors, and the police that such activity would be operated from back doors on alleys, at night. Contrast this situation with that of the white bookies, who, according to Quinn, “evidently prospered. Three flourished in my immediate neighborhood. I was aware not only of their existence but patronized them as well. The bookies made no pretense of being anything other than what they were. No camouflage. Anyone

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could walk in and lay a bet on a horse.”87 It is clear from Quinn’s recollections that whites could operate illegal businesses out of storefronts in the Mission, under no apparent police threat. Meanwhile, the storefronts of legitimate Chinese businesses might be subject to police raids, Public Health Department inspections, informal checks by the Anti-Jap Laundry League, and the violent games of white children. In the illicit economy, then, Chinese were permitted to operate only in the shadows; in the legitimate economy, they were permitted to operate only under surveillance. Any Asian person who might have wished to live in the Mission, outside of a laundry, would likely have found it very difficult to rent a flat or to purchase a home. Real estate professionals at the time believed that the presence of any nonwhite person would cause surrounding land values to depreciate—a self-fulfilling prophecy.88 The situation would have been even more difficult for Asians in the newer “exclusive home parks” just to the south of the core of the Mission.89 In 1916, the San Francisco Real Estate Board reported that the “Mission Terrace and the Crocker Amazon Tract are the leading restricted parks of the Mission and are enjoying a substantial growth.”90 According to the board, the developments had the same restrictions as the wealthier western neighborhoods like Ingleside Terraces and St. Francis Wood, where covenants stipulated that “no person of African, Asiatic or Mongolian descent shall be allowed to purchase, own or lease.”91 The Central Council West of Twin Peaks, which represented the new suburban tracts on the entire western half of San Francisco, lobbied the City Planning Commission (under Matt Sullivan) to incorporate these racial covenants into the First Residence zoning for the entire city. 92 The Rolph administration did not act on this recommendation, but the effort attests to the manner in which prevailing racial attitudes marginalized Asian residents.93 All of these racist practices help to explain the cultural identity of the Mission. They also help to explain why the physical neighborhood looked as it did.

The Cultural Significations of Union Architecture Like the MPA, the unions’ politics found architectural expression. But while the MPA mobilized the imagery of a romantic Spanish past, the unions did not feel so free to traffic in an exotic style. Instead, they hewed more closely to a design language that communicated the stability of AngloAmerican traditions. Some white ethnic churches and cultural centers did employ a Spanish architectural language, and individual unionist Mission-

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ites certainly did not resist attending mass in a Mission revival church or taking in a movie at El Capitan Theater. Upwardly mobile skilled unionists purchased small Spanish colonial homes in the Mission Terrace housing development, just to the south of the neighborhood. In theaters and modestly priced housing developments, ethnic identity was an accoutrement of affluence, and Mission residents had no apparent objection to consuming a fantasy of class mobility that was dressed in ethnic imagery. But when it came to prominent structures built by the white ethnic banking institutions, and by the unions themselves, neoclassicism prevailed. Unlike the MPA, labor organizations like the BTC had always supported the Burnham plan, and the neighborhood’s most prominent labor edifices—the Building Trades Temple and the Labor Council Temple— both employed an adapted Beaux-Arts aesthetic. The former was a steel and concrete building that featured a neoclassical balustrade and pilasters capped with Ionic scrolls. The Labor Council’s Temple followed the style of a Renaissance palazzo that, in the United States, was often associated with hotels, department stores, and other commercial buildings. Both structures had doorways framed with prominent scroll brackets and other classical details. Smaller halls around the Mission, like the Sheet Metal Workers’ Hall, were similarly adorned with Beaux-Arts elements. The white ethnic banks in the neighborhood were also decidedly neoclassical. Structures like the German Savings Bank and the Mission branches of both the Hibernia Bank and the San Francisco Savings & Loan Society are cases in point.94 All built between 1906 and 1930, these structures employed cut and dressed stone rather than stucco surfacing, flat rather than gabled roofs, cornices with dentils rather than red-tiled eaves, friezes with roman lettering rather than bell towers. (See fig. 4.13.) The cumulative visual effect of such elements was to render incidental any similarity to Mission architecture, like the occasional use of Tuscan columns. So while local businesses were laying claim to a Spanish heritage, partly in an attempt to distinguish themselves from the eastern United States, the unions reasserted their association with the east’s Anglo-American architectural vocabularies.95 Labor battled the city’s industrial magnates on the shop floor and formed coalitions with the Mission-based business community; yet in the field of aesthetics, the sympathies were reversed. In unions’ print culture—where financing, real estate, and the practical needs of the organizations were no barrier to creative expression—this taste for the neoclassical was even more pronounced. (See fig. 4.14.) For example, while the Building Trades Temple itself had some restrained neoclassical ornament, the Building Trades Temple Association certificates (which largely financed

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Figure 4.13. Upper left: a 1926 photograph of San Francisco Building Trades Temple; upper right: a 1929 photograph of San Francisco Labor Council Temple; lower left: undated photograph of Mission Branch of Hibernia Bank at Valencia and Twenty-Second Streets; lower right: undated photograph of Mission Branch of the San Francisco Savings and Loan Society. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco Public Library, photo ID numbers AAC-4687, AAC-4995, AAC-4544, AAC-4610.

the building) were illustrated with ornate Beaux-Arts elements (fig. 4.15). Fluted Corinthian columns appeared in the margins of the document; construction tools appeared both in the plinths of these columns and above the capitals in the entablature. In the center of the entablature was an image of the building to be. So where one might have expected to see the name of a great man or a relief of a Roman scene, here the iconography of labor was woven into a neoclassical facade, and the neoclassical facade framed a transaction between union and worker. Such intertwining of imagery suggests the possibility that union workers saw in this neoclassical architecture the finest expression of their labors. A survey of how architecture in general was represented in the union newspapers lends support to this interpretation. To take one example, in 1907

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Figure 4.14. Cover of the Labor Clarion, September 11, 1914.

Organized Labor published an article that described, with real connoisseurship, the Italianate design, with heavily rusticated angles and projecting marble balconies, of the new Metropolitan Life tower in New York.96 Architect Napoleon LeBrun & Sons had modeled the tower after the campanile in Piazza San Marco in Venice, a favorite of the Beaux-Arts.97 The unionist taste for the Beaux-Arts can be explained in terms of pride in craftsmanship and perhaps also the workers’ own economic aspirations. This interpretation is also lent support by a remarkable diary that made its way into the archives. George Farris, a journeyman carpenter who faithfully paid his dues to the BTC, recorded his impressions of his daily life from 1879 to 1910. Though he often complained about the conditions in which he worked, Farris took great satisfaction in the work itself. An entry from Tuesday, August 14, 1906, is typical: “My partner don’t understand

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stairbuilding so I cut the stringers and he puts on the risers and treads. Like stairbuilding, it is nice work.”98 Farris’s diary is filled with an understated admiration for craft, an admiration that seemed to be uninflected by class ideology.99 On a number of occasions, Farris expressed admiration for buildings in which he would not have been welcome himself. The most poignant example of this is the entry from August 19, 1906, when Farris described the scene on Nob Hill after the great fire: “Wandering among the ruins of the once aristocratic resident [sic] of town, it made me feel sad to see what was once fine homes now only a remnant of a foundation wall. The terrible tragedy is appalling.”100 When Farris visited his own former hotel residences, a week before his visit to Nob Hill, his descriptions were matter-of-fact, thin on adjectives, conveying none of the same emotion.101 Farris did entertain fantasies about upward mobility—as was most plainly visible in his obsession with the stock market—but he was also very critical of class relations. However, he was never critical of

Figure 4.15. Certificate of the San Francisco Building Trades Council’s Temple Association, with an image of the building to be inlaid in the entablature. Courtesy of San Francisco Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University.

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the way that buildings expressed these inequities; he seemed to exonerate the built environment. Illustrating again the power of the idea of improvement, even the Chamber of Commerce seemed to believe that if it wanted to appeal to labor, its best bet was to appeal to a shared appreciation of fine building— building itself could be mobilized to build goodwill. Consider the Palace Hotel Company’s 1914 advertisement in the Labor Clarion. The Palace and the Fairmont hotels, it announced, “are two most beautiful results of organized labor.”102 The management of the Palace and Fairmont—the city’s two most expensive hotels—was not hoping to win Clarion readers as customers. Rather, this was an artifact of a campaign that the downtown business community mounted in hopes of mending fences with labor as the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition approached: the business community had a vested interest in ensuring that the Exposition would be completed on schedule. The management of the Palace and Fairmont was well aware that organized labor reviled many of the characters inside their hotels. But they seemed to believe that labor would hold the built environment harmless— after all, improvement meant jobs.

Conclusion While any coalition between the unions and the Chamber of Commerce could only be provisional, a much more durable coalition prevailed in the Mission. The BTC and the SFLC supported the MPA’s projects, and the MPA, in turn, was unwavering in its support of the closed shop, home industry, Asiatic exclusion, and other union causes.103 Together, the improvement clubs and the unions were able to win a remarkable degree of political power for the Mission. Yet in order to win that power, the neighborhood’s institutions needed to mobilize a cultural politics, to establish an identity for the Mission—an identity in which residents could take pride and that could inspire respect from the neighborhood’s benefactor agencies, as well as from its opponents and competitors. Historians have argued that San Francisco Progressives mobilized a politics to serve the specific needs of subgroups, thereby fracturing a republican public sphere into a number of competing publics.104 These groups were organized primarily along dimensions of class, race, ethnicity, and gender. However, one dimension has so far been missed: neighborhood was also a crucial mode of political identification, one that was bound up with class, race, ethnicity, and gender, and one that political entrepreneurs cultivated to great effect. By mobilizing a bundle of cultural strategies—discursive, historical, and

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architectural—the leaders of the Mission helped to establish the neighborhood as a city within a city. The unions’ taste for a Beaux-Arts architectural idiom was not just about aesthetic preference; it reaffirmed an AngloAmericanness in physical space, claiming and defending a white man’s territory. On the other hand, the MPA and the merchants it represented chose to associate themselves with an older European tradition. This decision was intended not only to distinguish the Mission among retail districts but also to claim a civic legitimacy, “the venerability of age,” that could be leveraged in the contest for public largesse. Though the unions and the MPA diverged in their representational politics, collectively they created a stable identity for the Mission. As the oldest inhabited area of the city, and as the home of the Mission Dolores, the neighborhood was the heart of San Francisco and the wellspring of the city’s identity. The Mission, therefore, was more San Francisco than San Francisco, the thinking seemed to go. But though it was the keeper of San Francisco’s past, the Mission was also Progressive, entrepreneurial, and forward-looking. It was the steward of the public interest, ever vigilant against the scheming of “special interests,” particularly that special interest known as “downtown.” The Mission was David to downtown’s Goliath. The Mission was hardworking, and its residents were committed to creating shared prosperity. And most importantly for the unions, the Mission was white. The coalition among improvement clubs, unions, and local business depended upon continued economic prosperity and the maintenance of racial homogeneity. Because Latinos had not lived in the Mission since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the leaders of the neighborhood did not have to confront the contradictions between a romanticized Spanish colonial past and a Latino present. The events of the 1930s would change all of these circumstances, and would soon cause this delicate consensus to unravel.

Plate 1. Detail of Ralph Stackpole’s Industries of California in Coit Tower. Photo by author.

Plate 2. Detail of Ralph Stackpole’s Industries of California in Coit Tower. Also see the steelworker in Clifford Wright’s Leaders of California Life. Photo by author.

Plate 3. An Anglo woman, dressed as a señorita, walking with a Californian bear, in front of a Spanish-style building flying an American flag. California 1925 Diamond Jubilee promotional letterhead. Box 63, folder 42, Phelan Papers, Bancroft Library.

Plate 4. 1937 HOLC residential survey map of San Francisco. National Archives II, RG195, HOLC, location 450, 68:6:2/ box 147.

Plate 5. Illustration from elementary school textbook, 1948, showing transportation in the Bay Area and beyond. San Francisco appears at the tip of the peninsula, in the lower left. In the upper left are the cities of the San Joaquin Valley. Elementary School Department, San Francisco Unified School District, In and Out of San Francisco, book 2, San Francisco Social Studies Series, 1948. Vertical files, Schools, Social Studies file, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.

Plate 7. Detail of Homage to Siqueíros, 1974, by Jesus “Chuy” Campusano, Michael Rios, and Luis Cortazar. Located in the Bank of America building at Mission and Twenty-Third Streets, San Francisco. Photo by author.

Plate 6. Children being delivered from a dark Victorian present into a bright modernist future. Illustration from elementary school textbook, 1948. Elementary School Department, San Francisco Unified School District, San Francisco Today, book 1, San Francisco Social Studies Series, 1948. Vertical files, Schools, Social Studies file, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.

Plate 8. Detail of Homage to Siqueíros, 1974, by Jesus “Chuy” Campusano, Michael Rios, and Luis Cortazar. Located in the Bank of America building at Mission and Twenty-Third Streets, San Francisco. Photo by author.

FIVE

A New Population, Not a New Public: Latino Diversity in San Francisco and the Mission District One of this book’s central arguments is that to understand neighborhoodbased planning in the Mission District, one must understand ethnicity. Before coalitions could come together to plan for the neighborhood, residents, governmental agencies, and leaders of rival neighborhoods, all needed to believe that there was such a thing as “the Mission” to begin with. Ethnicity has always been a central feature of that identity. In the Progressive Era, the coalition between unions and the MPA was underwritten by an understanding that the Mission was white, and that the privileges of whiteness were to be defended, particularly against the invasion of socalled Asiatics. At the same time, Merchants and boosters in the neighborhood also mobilized a Spanish heritage politics as a strategy to both compete with other neighborhoods for municipal resources and encourage and celebrate Anglo upward mobility. The second half of Making the Mission will demonstrate that in the post–World War II period, local residents and institutions would capture planning power for the Mission in part by advancing a politics of multiethnicity. While the content of these cultural politics in the pre- and postwar periods could not have been more dissimilar, ethnicity nonetheless remained central. In the Mission, neighborhood identity was largely ethnic identity. For all these reasons, it is important to not only analyze discourses of ethnicity but also understand who was actually living in the neighborhood. Because the existing studies on this subject have overlooked or underemphasized a crucial demographic shift, this chapter will show that beginning in the early 1930s, the Mission saw a rapid influx of Latino residents, predominantly from Mexican backgrounds. In order to assess how this influx changed the Mission, it is necessary to first consider what it meant to be Latino in 1930s San Francisco. In fact, this identity was profoundly

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fluid. Both the Anglo majority and indeed Latinos themselves ascribed to Latino identity a wide range of subject positions, from upper class to poor, and from white to explicitly racialized. So while an influx of African Americans or of Asian immigrants would have clearly signaled “decline” to the Mission’s local residents and institutions, it was less clear what an influx of Latinos meant for the neighborhood. Indeed, the change went largely unnoticed, or at least unremarked upon, by the neighborhood’s leadership. What is clear in retrospect is that the neighborhood’s then thirty-year tradition of memorializing a Spanish past sat uncomfortably with this new and growing presence. It is also clear that what it meant to be a Missionite was about to change, even if the nature of that change was still opaque in the 1930s.

Tracing Latino Immigration to the Mission The historian David Gutiérrez has used the phrase “frustratingly fragmentary” to describe the early twentieth-century historical record with respect to the relationship between Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants.1 This phrase can be used to describe the historical record with respect to most subjects pertaining to Latino populations in San Francisco during the 1930s, and particularly with respect to the Mission District.2 Latinos began moving to the neighborhood early in the decade, but it is difficult to know where they moved from, why they chose to leave, why they selected the Mission as their new home, and how they related to the city’s established Latino populations and Anglo residents and institutions. The U.S. Census Bureau used idiosyncratic methods to count these populations, and many Latinos were undocumented. The city’s Spanish-language press was mostly focused on national stories or on matters pertaining to the politics of sending countries. The records of the Catholic parish of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, located in the colonia on the north side of town, contain no substantive information on the new Mission residents. Finally, this population was almost invisible in municipal documents. However, by reading many of these fragmentary sources together, one can assemble a narrative outline of Latino experience in San Francisco and the Mission District in the 1930s. The available evidence strongly suggests that Latinos, primarily from Mexican backgrounds, began moving to the Mission at least as early as 1931. The evidence also suggests that there was a class division in San Francisco between Latinos who claimed European Spanish descent and those who identified, or were identified, as mestizo (of mixed Indian descent). This division appears to have been correlated

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with skin color, the lighter-skinned Latinos being identified as European, and the darker as mestizo. The division also appears to have been at least loosely correlated with national background, Mexicans often being associated with mestizos while Central and South Americans were more typically associated with Spanish heritage. The division was perceived and maintained not only by Anglos but also by Latinos themselves. Existing studies of Latinos in the Mission District have focused on the postwar period and drawn their background history primarily from one study of San Francisco—a study that contains much useful research and analysis but also introduces some errors that leave the impression that the new Latino community was smaller than it was.3 One crucial error is to identify the first Spanish-language congregation as El Buen Pastor, at Sixteenth and Guerrero Streets, and to date the first Spanish-language service to 1940.4 This is at least seven years too late. The 1933 Crocker Langley Directory lists a Baptist church called the “Spanish Mission,” with “Rev Rosalio Corona pastor,” in a storefront address on Eleventh Street, in the northern end of the district.5 Because neighborhood churches typically were established in areas where there was already a potential congregation, there is reason to assume that Latino settlement on the northern end of the district began prior to 1933.6 In nearly every succeeding year, the directory listed a new Pentecostal or Baptist Spanish-language church in the neighborhood, sometimes in buildings that had only recently hosted Irish or Danish congregations.7 By 1942 there were at least seven Spanish-language churches in the Mission, all Protestant denominations. Latino Catholics certainly lived in the neighborhood, too, but the Catholic parish structure required them to attend their own language parish, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, in the “Latin Quarter” (today known as North Beach). In 1944 Catholic Archbishop John Mitty received a petition with at least one hundred signatures from Mission addresses, approximately a quarter of the total signatures, requesting that a dismissed priest be reinstated at the Spanish-language parish.8 In 1943, Isaura Michell de Rodriguez, a recent Mexican immigrant and an employee of the Mission District St. Peter’s Catholic parish, counted nine storefront Protestant churches in the heart of the district alone.9 In 1946, a priest in the St. Peter’s parish church “counted 12 different storefront churches that had sprung up” in the central part of the neighborhood.10 These figures are all higher than existing studies would lead one to expect for the 1930s and 1940s. Churches were not the only indication that there was a growing Latino population in the Mission. While Spanish-language newspapers like El Im-

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parcial never featured stories on the neighborhood, the paper did contain advertisements for Mexican groceries, Latino handymen, Latino-owned laundries, and other businesses that listed Mission addresses as early as 1931; there were also businesses that were apparently owned by Anglos but that catered to Latinos in the Mission.11 In the early 1930s, the Anglo Land Company even began taking out Spanish-language advertisements for Mission real estate in El Imparcial.12 Taking all of these scraps of information together, it becomes clear that there were distinct residential clusters in the northern, southeastern, and central areas of the neighborhood. Many have suggested that the earliest Latino settlement was in the more industrial northern Mission.13 But real estate and business advertisements from the Spanish-language press suggest that Latinos were moving to the more residential central Mission at the same time, or even earlier.14 New scholarship contains interviews with former residents who confirm there were indeed “Mexican enclaves” in these areas.15 Though the presence of Latino businesses does not conclusively prove that there were residential concentrations, when read against the “1939 Real Property Survey” the collective sources leave little room for doubt that Latinos were indeed settling in the Mission. The survey, conducted by the WPA in partnership with the San Francisco Housing Authority (SFHA), reported a “percentage non-white” figure for every block in the city, a measure that allows for rough estimates of the size of the Latino population.16 During the 1930s, city directories furnish no evidence of a significant nonwhite population in the Mission other than Latino—all of the Mission’s nonwhite clusterings in the survey correspond to Latino businesses and churches from the city directories. For example, the block of Eleventh Street that hosted the “Spanish Mission” Baptist church was 60 percent nonwhite; the “Spanish Pentecostal” church on Seventeenth Street (“Rev Luis Cavallo pastor”) was adjacent to a block that was 66.7 percent nonwhite.17 Assuming then that the nonwhite population of the Mission was overwhelmingly Latino, a comparison of the survey’s population density mappings and nonwhite mappings suggests that there may have been at least a thousand Latinos living in the Mission by 1939, again higher figures than the historiography would lead one to expect.18 Some federal agencies, most notably the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), would later describe these same Latinos as white—highlighting the ambiguous racial status of Latinos in San Francisco—yet there is abundant evidence to suggest that the WPA identified them as nonwhite, or as belonging to a “miscellaneous race” (as the survey occasionally referred to Mexicans).19

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The existing fragments of evidence suggest that these Latinos were mostly from Mexican backgrounds, rather than Central and South American.20 For example, the 1938 Crocker-Langley Directory lists a church on Capp Street near Twenty-Fourth, in the central Mission, named Iglesia Bautista Mexicana (Mexican Baptist Church). The pastor, Rosalio Corona, was the same man who had served at the Eleventh Street church, which suggests that the northern Mission cluster might have also been Mexican and Mexican American. A store called La Morena, in the central Mission, was advertising “Abarrotes Mexicanos” (Mexican groceries) in El Imparcial as early as 1931.21 While stores and churches help to establish the geography of Latino public life, they say precious little about Latino experience. There is, however, one 1930s ethnographic collection that provides not only additional evidence that Mission Latinos were predominantly Mexican but also gives clues as to the new residents’ status in relation to Anglos and to more established San Francisco Latinos. In 1934 and 1935 the California State Emergency Relief Administration (SERA) funded the “Survey of San Francisco Minorities.” The survey was conducted by Paul Radin, an anthropologist trained by Franz Boas at Columbia University and who had taught at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and Brandeis. Radin oversaw the work of over two hundred interviewers—mostly underemployed white-collar workers—who set out “to study the steps in the adjustment and assimilation of minority groups in San Francisco and Alameda counties, from the first arrival to the present time.”22 Rather than use a questionnaire, Radin’s amateur interviewers recorded “anything and everything which the interviewees wished to say.”23 The original handwritten interviews number in the thousands. They include dozens of interviews with people from Mexican backgrounds, and dozens more with people from Central and South American backgrounds. Unfortunately for the present study, the interviewers rarely asked where in San Francisco the subjects lived. This information was recorded for about ten Central and South American informants—all of whom lived in the Latin Quarter’s colonia—but not for Mexicans. Still, the Radin Papers contain many details about Latino life stories that give clues about residential patterns and social experience. In the postwar period, San Francisco’s Central American immigrants (many refugees from civil wars) tended to have working-class backgrounds that were comparable to the city’s Mexican immigrants. Not so the prewar Central and South American immigrants, who were much more likely to have been professionals and even politicians in their home countries. Many of these immigrants came di-

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rectly by sea to San Francisco and found employment as doctors, dentists, pharmacists, small business owners, newspaper reporters, downtown secretaries, or administrators for importing businesses. By contrast, the Mexican interviewees in the Radin Papers recount circuitous routes to the city, which often began in the impoverished state of Sonora and wended their way through factories in South Texas and Los Angeles, through the fields of the rural Coachella Valley, and ended in the San Francisco shipyards or canneries.24 In the 1930s, the working-class Mexican immigrants were more likely to have found accommodations in the Mission than in the North Beach colonia. The Mission had a much higher percentage of blocks with “substandard” dwellings than did the colonia, and rents in the colonia were typically at least 20 percent higher than they were in the Mission—on some blocks they were twice as high.25 The average Mexican or Mexican American could afford to live in the Mission, but probably not in the colonia. In addition, many of the Mexican immigrants interviewed stated specifically that they preferred not to live in a colonia (for reasons they did not explain), while the Central and South Americans made no such comments.26 Because there were only two areas of San Francisco with substantial concentrations of Latino businesses, it is reasonable to assume that Central and South Americans, as well as long-established Mexicans and Californios, clustered in North Beach, while newly arrived Mexicans began to cluster in the Mission. In the late 1920s many Latinos lived on Rincon Hill, in the South of Market area, near the coffee companies, fruit importers, canneries, agricultural refineries, and industrial plants.27 Because most of the Mexican immigrants interviewed in the Radin Papers reported working in precisely these industries, it stands to reason that the low-rent Rincon Hill would have been largely Mexican. Rincon Hill was almost entirely condemned in the early 1930s, in order to make way for the approaches to the Bay Bridge. The destruction of this neighborhood corresponded to the growth of a Latino neighborhood in the Mission, which again suggests that the new “nonwhites” in the Mission were from Mexican backgrounds.

The Indeterminacy of Latino Identity How should this influx of Mexican-heritage immigrants be understood? Some historians have characterized the new Latino migration to the Mission as “in a sense recapturing past turf.”28 There is evidence that this interpretation is more than just the historian’s conceit: it occurred to some longtime residents of the neighborhood, too. In 1962, a Chronicle article

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stated that the influx of Latinos brought “the Mission District’s immigration cycle full circle, for of course it was the Spanish who discovered the area in the first place.”29 Taken literally, this proposition is muddled. The area had not been Mexico for at least three generations and had not been Spain for four. The only local residents who might be able to claim direct heredity were the Californios, and there is no evidence of any Californio residential concentrations in the Mission. The new residents were workingclass Mexicans, who likely had as much neophyte heritage as Spanish colonist heritage. Whose past turf were they reclaiming? All of that said, the reclamation narrative is clearly not intended literally, and there may in fact have been a sense in which the new residents themselves did feel that they were reclaiming past turf. After all, the Mission District was the home of the Mission Dolores, founded by the Spanish in 1776, and the neighborhood did have a habit of celebrating this heritage in the built environment. Many spaces of the neighborhood did possess an aura of Spanishness, even if it was a memorialized Spanishness, employed for the purpose of signaling white prosperity.30 There is some fragmentary evidence, in the Spanish-language press, that middle-class Latinos did feel a sense of pride in the newly popular Spanish architecture. For example, an article from the San Francisco paper La Cronica praised the Spanish colonial design of the Panama-California Exposition in San Diego.31 It is also true that some of the buildings that the new Spanish-language congregations took over were Spanish colonial in design—including the Danish Methodist Episcopal Church on Seventeenth Street, which became the Spanish Pentecostal Church in 1937, and the Salem Swedish Baptist Church on Capp Street, which became the Iglesia Bautista Mexicana in 1938.32 However, it must also be borne in mind that when one looks at the larger emerging geography of Spanish-language churches, no convincing patterns emerge. Some congregations took over Spanish colonial buildings, but the new Mision de Completo Evangelio, on Twenty-Fourth Street, took over an Anglo Gothic revival structure complete with pointed arches and stained glass. In fact, the vast majority of the new Latino churches and businesses in the Mission went into speculative storefronts, not AngloGothic or Spanish colonial structures. While individual congregations may indeed have felt pride in their new Spanish colonial buildings, the romantic reclamation narrative ultimately distracts from the larger patterns and the material consequences of Latino migration. Rather than push the reclamation narrative, it is more informative to examine the intersection between the spatial requirements of a new group and the changing realities of a local real estate market. The new arrivals needed a place to live, shop, and

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worship. It seems likely that these more prosaic concerns took precedence over any ideologies about recapturing turf, especially during such difficult economic times. In order to explain how this new population fared in the Mission—and how it changed the character of the place—it is necessary to move beyond the reclamation narrative and to try to understand how Latino identity figured in the race and ethnicity politics of broader San Francisco. While African Americans during this period were everywhere a racialized group, Latino identity was much harder to pin down. In San Francisco, as in many other cities, the distinction between “Spanish” (or sometimes “Latin”) and Indian or mestizo (mixed) marked the line between racialized and nonracialized. This distinction had purchase not only among Anglos but also among Latinos themselves. In most city agency reports and in local reportage, Latinos were nearly invisible. When Latinos were mentioned, though, the observations were often preposterous, as in the 1926 recreation survey that reported that a “study was made of the leisure-time activities of the Mexican population and it was found that the chief pastime was gambling, often followed by a stabbing party.”33 The author offered no elaboration on how one might recognize the key features of “a stabbing party.” The Radin interviews offered observations that were less absurd, but often no less xenophobic. The fact that the interviews were conducted by amateur ethnographers makes them unreliable as a source for understanding Latino worldviews, but they are a reliable gauge of the racial attitudes of the white-collar, Anglo interviewers who constituted San Francisco’s professional class. Almost without exception, interviewers who expressed positive impressions of an informant noted the subject’s Spanish or even white heritage, while interviewers expressing negative impressions almost invariably noted Indian heritage. The pattern was illustrated succinctly by one interviewer who noted of his subject that “he has quite a dash of white blood in him, being uncommonly tall for a Mexican, say 5 ft 9, and with very regular features, creamy coloured skin and light brown eyes. He is married to a typical Mexican Indian, short, swarthy and very dirty.”34 Here, as in most of the interviews, “Indian” was correlated with “Mexican,” and both identifications were correlated with characteristics like passivity and slovenliness.35 Though many of the interviewers expressed sympathy for their Mexican subjects, representing them as simple people who had been victimized by the capitalist system, others were less charitable. For example, one interviewer noted this of his college-educated subject, Mr. Hernandez: “His father was Spanish, his mother was a fullblood [sic] Yaqui squaw. His fea-

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tures and characteristics trend largely to the mother’s blood.”36 After noting that Hernandez worked as an announcer at the Tanforan racetrack, taking “the place of a capable and jobless American citizen,” the interviewer concluded with the following observation: “In brief, Mr. Hernandez ‘does not belong,’ socially, racially, or industrially. (NOTE: But there’s nothing your humble reporter can do about it!)”37 Radin’s interviewers typically noted that their Mexican subjects had Indian heritage, and then went on to record unfavorable impressions of them. By contrast, the interviewers tended to note the Spanish heritage of their Central and South American informants, of whom they recorded much more favorable impressions. In those few reports where negative perceptions of Central and South Americans were voiced, the interviewer expressed his or her own class and race consciousness with relation to the interviewee. For example, one interviewer described the refined manners of a newly arrived young Colombian woman—the daughter of a coffee magnate—as follows: “Her blond hair worn in short braids in front and her beautifully cut features made the other girls think that she was a like a princess stepping out of a story book. . . . She has never had to do any kind of work—they [her family members] have a retinue of servants—and she can’t understand how the girls here manage to work their way through College.” After noting that the young woman was disdainful of “Negroes” and “Orientals,” the ethnographer remarked, “It would be interesting to interview this girl again two or three years from now and see what kind of effect democracy has on aristocracy.”38 While most interviewers unreflectively used the terms “Spanish” or “Latin” with a positive inflection, some did seem to be attuned to the heritage politics embedded in those identifications. As one interviewer observed of a subject, “It may be that this woman who assumes certain Spanish mannerisms herself was attempting to assure herself of her superiority over Mexicans.”39 This and other Radin interviews strongly suggest that there was a class difference, one that was often racialized, between Central and South Americans, on the one hand, and Mexicans and Mexican Americans, on the other. One Chilean importer, for example, remarked that all the houses in his home region of Chile had “a cook and a washwoman, a house man or ‘cholo,’ and a nursemaid or house girl.”40 While for an upper-class Chilean “cholo” may have been a relatively neutral term to describe a mestizo male servant in his home country, it would likely have sounded “ugly” to many Mexican Americans.41 As David Gutiérrez makes clear, by the 1930s, cholo had a long history as a term of abuse that Californios used to describe poor, particularly Sonoran, Mexicans.42

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In his 1930 study, the Mexican sociologist Manuel Gamio noted that many Mexicans in the United States also claimed a Spanish heritage as a means of evading the “stigma of indigenous blood.”43 This was true even of those whose “color and features show[ed] marked indigenous” traits. According to Gamio, however, both “white and brown Mexicans” also described themselves as belonging to a single group: La Raza.44 The Radin Papers confirm that this was also true of many Mexicans and Mexican Americans living in San Francisco. Though la raza translates literally to “the race,” the term paradoxically erased race, serving as a bridge across European and indigenous racial distinctions, substituting an identity position that was based on language and, secondarily, on national origin. In San Francisco, Columbus Day was celebrated by Latinos from all national backgrounds as the Fiesta de la Raza (though it was the Spanish consul who would deliver an address).45 While raza was sometimes invoked in the Spanish-language press, more common were the terms latino, colonia latina (Latino colony), or colonia de habla español (Spanish-speaking colony), all of which also served as pan-ethnic identifications, uniting white and brown, Spanish and indigenous, Central American and Mexican into a single community. While many Mexicans may have preferred not to live in the geographical colonia in North Beach, there is every indication that they provisionally regarded themselves as part of the colonia latina and the colonia de habla español. Over the coming decades, they would increasingly regard themselves as Missionites.

Conclusion It was not until the immediate postwar period that the Latino presence in the Mission began to register in the citywide press, the Merchants’ newspapers, Catholic parish newsletters, or in any other easily accessible documentation. An influx of African Americans, or of Chinese or Japanese immigrants, would almost certainly have been discussed in these outlets and clearly signaled “decline” to the unions and to the Mission Merchants’ Association. But Latino immigration seems to have passed almost unnoticed. While the new presence failed to register in local publications, the absence itself provides evidence that Latinos were essentially invisible as Latinos. This likely explains why the literature on the neighborhood has underemphasized and in some cases completely overlooked this demographic change. Yet it is important to understand that this transformation was under way if we hope to understand the identity of the Mission, the trajectory

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of neighborhood-based planning, and who the beneficiaries of such planning were to be. Having established that many Latinos, primarily Mexicans, were living in the Mission District as early as 1931, and having also established some of the basic dynamics of Latino life in prewar San Francisco, it is now possible to take full stock of neighborhood planning—particularly New Deal interventions—through the Great Depression and World War II.

SIX

Economic Equality, Racial Erasure: The Spatial and Cultural Interventions of Federal Public Works Agencies The 1930s witnessed profound changes in American society; the relationships between citizen and state, worker and employer, and municipal and federal governments would be fundamentally altered. Many places would also see a dramatic reordering of the relationship between cities and their neighborhoods. This was certainly the case in San Francisco. During the city’s long Progressive Era, small and informal civic groups had been able to exert decisive influence over the planning of their home neighborhoods. But by the end of the 1930s, a variety of factors coalesced to constrain such groups, including plummeting property tax revenues, a frozen bond market, and generalized economic insecurity. A set of federal programs distributed direct aid to individual workers, but in their support of urban planning schemes and the real estate market, these programs exhibited a pronounced corporatist bias, tending to favor more centralized and formally organized entities (big businesses, unions, governmental agencies) over smaller organizations. To tell the story of urban planning in the Mission through the long Progressive Era is to tell the story of what neighborhood-based groups were planning for themselves. In the 1930s, however, the story becomes much more about what municipal and federal agencies were planning on behalf of the neighborhood. The MPA had been incomparable in its ability to attract municipal largesse, but with the onset of the Great Depression, there was no largesse to be lobbied for. These larger structural changes were compounded by some local circumstances that also boded ill for neighborhood power. The Mission suffered privations that were typical to workingclass districts in the urban West, but it also lost a measure of political capital that most other neighborhoods never possessed to begin with. On August 10, 1937, the San Francisco Chronicle reported the death of

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Matthew Sullivan, a cofounder of the MPA, the former chief justice of the California Supreme Court, and the “Mission’s noted son.” He was eighty. The Chronicle described Sullivan as an “empire builder,” and much of what he built was located in the political and physical environment of his lifelong neighborhood.1 On the occasion of Sullivan’s death in 1937, the Chronicle observed that the “last of the Mission’s great triumvirate—Governor James Rolph, Senator James Phelan and now Judge Matt I. Sullivan—had passed.”2 Phelan had died in 1930, Rolph in 1934. If not for its unapologetic antipathy toward labor, the Chronicle might have also mentioned the death, in 1933, of P. H. McCarthy, the president of the powerful Building Trades Council (BTC) and a Union Labor Party (ULP) mayor (1910–12). Mission-based power was never reducible to these distinguished personalities, but losing them did not help matters for the neighborhood. The district’s physical fabric was also proving to be a challenge. Luck had graced the neighborhood in April 1906 when the great fire stopped at the doorstep of the Mission Dolores, sparing all but a handful of blocks to the south. But the fact that the 1890s urban fabric was still extant proved a liability by the 1930s. Assessment practices at the time favored newer structures, and private loans for rehabilitation were difficult to come by.3 By 1939, the percentage of residential structures in need of major repair was much higher in the Mission than in most of the rest of the city, including Chinatown.4 Average monthly rents in the Mission were well below those of most of the neighborhoods north of Market Street and were about half that of the newer neighborhoods on the western side of the city.5 As the Bay Area economy continued to regionalize, the industrial employment center in the northeast of the Mission also began to show signs of distress. Beginning in the 1920s, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce was cooperating with business leaders from the surrounding counties in the hopes of fostering an efficient regional economy that could challenge the Los Angeles metropolitan area for investment.6 Business leaders around the Bay Area began to promote economies of scale by moving manufacturing to peripheral cities in Alameda, Contra Costa, and San Mateo Counties, and allowing San Francisco to function as the “hub city” where management and finance would be concentrated.7 As the economy regionalized, San Francisco manufacturing lost ground to surrounding cities like Oakland and San Leandro; within San Francisco, manufacturing lost ground to finance as the city’s major industry.8 A changing role in the regional economy, a deteriorating physical fabric, and a loss of prominent political advocates combined with generalized economic insecurity to produce an environment in which neighborhood-based planning power would be tested.

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As in so many places around the country, a set of New Deal agencies intervened within this environment to invest in infrastructure. The Mission hosted major projects from the United States Housing Authority (USHA), Works Progress Administration (WPA), and Public Works Administration (PWA). The WPA was established in 1935 for the purposes of revitalizing the nation’s infrastructure while providing relief to the unemployed. The administration directly hired its own laborers and put them to work on civic buildings, streets, bridges, sidewalks, and nearly every other kind of infrastructural project. The PWA was founded in 1933 and differed from the WPA in two respects: first, the agency did not hire workers directly but rather contracted with architectural and engineering firms; second, though there was considerable overlap between the types of projects that the two agencies would adopt, the PWA tended to focus on larger civil engineering projects, like tunnels and hydroelectric plants. The USHA was established in 1937 for the purpose of providing public housing. To accomplish its mandate, it partnered with local municipal agencies—here, the San Francisco Housing Authority (SFHA). These agencies did much to revitalize the physical fabric of the Mission while simultaneously diminishing the role of neighborhood-based groups, reducing them to at best junior partners in an emerging planning regime. While the federal public works agencies did treat the Mission as a city within a city insofar as they respected the distinct character of the neighborhood—particularly its identity as a preserve of political whiteness—their collaborations with city agencies also served to scale planning power up the municipal level, away from the neighborhoods. These changes were expressed in the selection of projects and the institutional configuration through which the projects were carried out. This was the beginning of the end for neighborhood capitalism. But the projects also communicated culturally through their architecture and indirectly through the discourses that circulated around them— discourses about race, labor, and the definition of the public interest. New Deal projects across San Francisco and the country varied widely in their impacts. Since, in most cases, it was local rather than federal agencies that ultimately determined what would be built where, projects tended to respond to the spatial and political contexts into which they were inserted. But to respect a context was not always to conform to it. In responding to existing sociopolitical and spatial arrangements, the WPA, PWA, and USHA reinforced some existing power relations but undermined others. In the Mission these agencies promoted a shift in the balance of power by tabling the concerns of the local business community, while privileging the inter-

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ests of labor. At the same time, however, the agencies reinforced some patterns of racial discrimination that had prevailed in the neighborhood. There were at least a dozen New Deal projects in the Mission, and most fit comfortably into the neighborhood’s established development priorities. Both local business and labor had long agreed upon the desirability of securing government funding for the expansion of amenities, and in most instances the fact that the funding was coming from a different level of government made no difference. Neither business nor labor complained about the PWA’s expansion of the hospital, or about the new WPA sidewalks, playgrounds, police station, or school for “crippled children.” There were other projects, however, that did establish new priorities, most notably the public housing projects in the neighborhood.

“The Mission Has Never Taken Anything Lying Down”: Public Housing and Neighborhood Power When it opened in the southern end of the Mission in 1940, Holly Courts (118 units) was the first public housing “project west of the Mississippi.”9 The architect, Arthur Brown Jr., was perhaps best known for his 1915 design of city hall, under the Rolph administration. With a dome taller than the U.S. Capitol’s, the building is one of the country’s finest examples of Beaux-Arts civic architecture. At Holly Courts, Brown worked in a distinctly modernist language. The early stages of the planning and construction of Holly Courts passed without much comment from Mission-based institutions (except the BTC, which heartily supported the project).10 The relative quiet was perhaps attributable to the fact that public housing was still a novelty, and groups like the Mission Merchants’ Association did not yet know what to make of it. Also, Holly Courts was located on the periphery of the neighborhood, and it had replaced only aging housing.11 The Valencia Gardens public housing project would be a different story. The old Recreation Park baseball stadium had stood in a central location in the northern Mission District, with the Building Trades Temple one block to the west, and the San Francisco armory one block to the east. In 1938 the park was razed to make way for Valencia Gardens, a 246-unit project funded by the USHA.12 Recreation Park had been a monument of the neighborhood’s commercial geography and a public amenity that bolstered the neighborhood’s status as a city within a city. When Valencia Gardens opened in 1943, it substituted in that prominent space a public monument to state sponsorship of economic egalitarianism. As with Holly Courts, this project signaled its social, economic, and

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Figure 6.1. William Wurster’s Valencia Gardens, a USHA project. (Thomas Church was the landscape architect.) San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, AAD-6120.

political ambitions through architecture. Designed by William Wurster, Valencia Gardens borrowed heavily from the architectural language of the siedlungen, the public housing projects that were built in Germany and socialist Vienna in the 1920s (see fig. 6.1). The implications of this frankly socialist-inspired project were no longer lost on conservative factions of the Mission’s population, who were accustomed to having their property values stand at the center of policy and planning debates. Both Valencia Gardens and a third project called Cogswell—named after a nearby vocational school—in the northeastern Mission were met with a “storm of protest.”13 The projects were enthusiastically supported by the unions but bitterly opposed by local homeowners’ groups, real estate interests, and the Mission Merchants’ Association on the grounds that they would depress surrounding property values, socialize the real estate market, and bring a lower-grade population to the area, thereby “putting the stigma of ‘slum area’ in the Greater Mission District.”14 Invoking and defending the Mission’s distinctive identity and its prerogatives of self-governance, I. S. McCulloch, spokesperson for the Mer-

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chants, expressed outrage that proponents of public housing had collected signatures from people outside the neighborhood for their petition.15 In 1940, the weekly Mission Enterprise editorialized that the Housing Authority’s push to win approval for two projects in the Mission was “the sort of ‘blitzkrieg’ that is fashionable in Europe. It is as un-American as the Gestapo.” The article went on to compare the SFHA to a “Dictatorship” and concluded with a defiant statement: “The Mission has never taken anything lying down and we will continue the fight against the Valencia and Cogswell sites.”16 As in the city’s other neighborhoods, Anglo residents and business owners in the Mission were particularly concerned that the projects would disrupt the racial composition of their district.17 This list of objections was sufficient to keep the SFHA from moving forward with the Cogswell project.18 However, the SFHA successfully argued that the need for workers’ housing was too acute to do nothing, and the two other projects were built as planned, with some concessions about tenancy.19 That anything at all should be built in the Mission over the pointed objections of the Mission Merchants’ Association marked a significant shift in the spatial politics of the neighborhood and the political economy of broader San Francisco. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, no special district, corporate entity, or municipal, state, or federal agency had pushed through a single project in the neighborhood without the approval of the MPA or, after 1920, the Mission Merchants. The MPA had served as a quasi-official governing body, successfully positioning itself as the representative of the public interest of the Mission, but the SFHA-USHA projects effectively recast the neighborhood bodies as special interests. Although the SFHA and the USHA made clear that the moral authority of Mission-based merchant and homeowner groups was no longer sacrosanct, they also understood that to completely ignore the storm of protest from such groups around the city would be to jeopardize their own projects. Part of the SFHA’s solution was to apply the USHA’s “neighborhood pattern” guideline, which stated that the tenants of any project would mirror the racial and ethnic composition of the surrounding neighborhood. The guideline was not law, but it was applied across the country when local housing authorities met with resistance from white homeowners, businesspeople, and city governments.20 The guideline did face opposition from the leaders of San Francisco’s public housing movement, like Alice Griffith, a driving force behind the establishment of the SFHA. Political expediency, however, trumped her objections.21 Members of the SFHA’s Negro and Chinese Advisory Committees grudgingly approved the neighborhood guideline—tabling larger civil rights concerns—because their communities so

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desperately needed the housing.22 As a result, the Westside Courts was built for African Americans in the Fillmore, and the Ping Yuen project was built for Chinese Americans in Chinatown. During this period, the SFHA’s success in housing many of the city’s minority residents was achieved only on segregationist terms. The case of Valencia Gardens highlights the fact that the neighborhood pattern guideline did not aim to faithfully mirror the demographic composition of the surrounding area so much as attempt to assuage the fears and defend the perceived interests of neighboring Anglos. By the late 1930s the area of the northern Mission District surrounding the Valencia Gardens site contained two large Latino residential clusters; some nearby city blocks were more than 66 percent Latino, likely Mexican.23 It follows, then, that strict adherence to the neighborhood guideline would have dictated that at least some of the tenants of the project be Latino. But like Holly Courts in the southern end of the neighborhood, Valencia Gardens was officially open only to whites. Federal Public Housing Administration (PHA) records from 1938 to 1960 show that African Americans were first admitted to Valencia Gardens and Holly Courts in September 1954, on the heels of Banks v. SFHA, which was decided in May of that year. In Banks, the California Appellate Court ruled that the neighborhood guideline was unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal—meaning that housing authorities could no longer segregate projects as a matter of policy.24 However, from construction through 1960, neither Valencia Gardens nor Holly Courts reported any “other non-white” tenants. The record shows that the projects were open only to blacks and whites; in other words, there was a de facto exclusion of Asians and Latinos. Now, it is important to note that Latinos almost certainly did live in Valencia Gardens, even before the neighborhood guideline was ruled unconstitutional in 1954. The Crocker-Langley Directory first contained reverse listings by address in 1953, and those listings show that at least some of the residents of Valencia Gardens had Hispanic surnames; approximately one-third of the residents had Hispanic surnames by 1974.25 However, from construction through 1960, the PHA still reported that Valencia Gardens had no “other non-white” tenants. Practically speaking, Latinos were admitted to Valencia Gardens only insofar as they could be considered white; any Mexicans with mestizo heritage would have to pass for white if they wished to live in the project. There is an irony in the design story here. William Wurster stated that in designing Valencia Gardens he took cues not only from German and Austrian public housing but also from Mexican

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courtyard architecture.26 Given the exclusionary guidelines about tenancy, and in spite of Wurster’s apparently egalitarian intentions, the Mexican architectural references conformed to the neighborhood’s long-standing selfpromotional practice of commemorating Latin-ness even as Mexicans were excluded. The Mission’s two housing projects did, however, help to establish that business interest was not necessarily the public interest. The economic disaster of the Depression created a climate in which business became suspect, and workers could be valorized as the public. As World War II drew near, this dynamic was magnified, and the federal and municipal governments expedited the construction of Valencia Gardens precisely because they recognized war worker housing as fundamental to the public interest.27 It may be that the battle over public housing marked the moment when neighborhood-based merchants and homeowners stopped claiming the mantle of “the public” in planning debates. In the postwar period, neighborhood groups would begin appealing to their status as “the people,” “citizens,” or “the community.” Perhaps for merchants and homeowners, “public housing” gave the term “public” an unsavory set of associations, calling to mind an overreaching governmental authority. Whatever the case, it is clear that once the projects were built, the Merchants decided that it was best to integrate the new residents, mostly young families with husbands working in the war industries. These war workers were not the poor minorities that the Merchants had worried about; they were white and middle class.28 They were also potential patrons of local businesses. In 1941, the SFHA reported on a survey it conducted among neighbors of Holly Courts: “Many who held fantastic ideas concerning the type of persons to be housed and the effect on private property, have become staunch proponents since learning the real purpose and effect of the complete operation.”29 A review of the Mission Merchants’ News confirms this interpretation. The paper began featuring occasional stories highlighting the pride that the housing project’s new neighbors took in their space (like the front-garden competition held in Holly Courts), stories that highlighted how much new residents had in common with nearby homeowners.30 Valencia Gardens and Holly Courts marked a change in how the Mission District was planned. Before the 1930s, the local business community was the sole entity to decide what would be built. Now municipal and federal agencies might decide—even over the Merchants’ loud objections— what would be built where and for whom.

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To Help “Native-Born Americans”: The PWA and the Samuel Gompers Trade School Though the public housing projects were the most controversial among the Merchants, a number of other New Deal projects more quietly signaled a renegotiation of the public interest. The Samuel Gompers Trade School was funded by the PWA, working with the San Francisco Unified School District. The building opened in August 1937, across the street from La Morena Mexican grocery store on Valencia and Twenty-Second Streets.31 The architects, Masten & Hurd, employed a Streamline Moderne idiom, an aesthetic that celebrated industrial design (fig. 6.2). The SFLC’s Labor Clarion reported approvingly that the plan followed the common “T” shape of the modern factory.32 Union labor had been a prominent physical presence in the Mission—most notably in the Building Trades Temple and the SFLC’s Labor Temple—yet this was the first edifice to labor that was financed with government money.

Figure 6.2. Masten & Hurd’s Samuel Gompers Vocational School, a PWA project. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, AAD-8873.

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The school’s curriculum and faculty profile also signaled new support for the interests of workers. The curriculum was typical of vocational schools at the time, including courses on welding, tool and die work, radio repair, drafting, and other skills that workers needed to succeed in an industrial economy. After the onset of World War II, the school offered the same set of courses, now promoting them as a means of securing the future not only of individual workers but of the country itself.33 While the teachers responsible for courses like aircraft drafting and diesel engine theory held college degrees, the majority of the faculty were union laborers, none of whom held more than a high school degree. This apparently seemed unfair to many employees of the Unified School District, the vast majority of whom were required to hold postsecondary degrees.34 Like Valencia Gardens, the school was a physical and institutional expression of new government support for the interests of workers. But also like Valencia Gardens, the school did not challenge the discriminatory practices and attitudes that were common in the neighborhood. Because Gompers was a PWA project and because it later received federal funding for war industries training, federal nondiscrimination clauses ensured that official school policy was to weigh student applications “without considerations of sex, race, color, or religious belief or affiliation.”35 But national background did not appear on the list of personal characteristics that were to be ignored in admissions decisions. Early curricula and enrollment data for the school have not been archived, so it is difficult to say whether immigrants (naturalized or otherwise) were admitted. What is clear, however, is that any immigrant students who might have been admitted would have had to contend with nativist attitudes. School publications were peppered with references to citizenship and nation that clearly presumed to speak to a student body that was born in the United States. In the school’s 1943 course catalog, the description of the required sequence in U.S. history promised to “give students knowledge and appreciation of their native land.”36 A measure of that nativism was likely explained by the broader cultural conditions of World War II, but local unions and education officials had viewed the school as a vehicle for promoting a nativist agenda well before the onset of war. In a 1937 article covering Board of Education meetings, the Labor Clarion reported that one of the primary aims of the Gompers curriculum was to help “native-born Americans” compete with the skilled labor of the foreign born.37 Such training was needed “if American-born boys are to be given equal opportunity with those coming from other lands to acquire journeyman skill in industrial occupations.”38 That the school was named in honor of Samuel Gompers, the nativist AFL leader, also

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served to symbolically reinforce an anti-immigrant bias.39 As with Valencia Gardens, this project communicated support for the privileges of political whiteness as well as the ideal of economic equality. The efforts of the New Deal public works agencies were one of a number of factors that emboldened labor to claim the mantle of the public for themselves. In 1937, the Labor Clarion printed a piece on economic relations by Richard Lyon, a hosiery worker, who neatly encapsulated ideas often expressed in both the Clarion and Organized Labor: They have constituted themselves the public, with their corporations, their legal trickeries, their factories, their guns, their police, their courts, their company towns, their economic control. But they are not the public. The public is made up of you and me, and of all others who work for a living; of the middle classes, who at least as consumers are vitally affected by everything labor does. We are the public, and ours is the public interest.40

After announcing that labor and the middle classes constituted the public, Lyon went on to discuss the federal legislation that protected the right to organize and to engage in collective bargaining: “The Wagner Act,” he wrote, “should be the great equalizer. At present it is only partly that. This corporation and anti-labor talk that the Wagner Act takes everything from the employer and gives it to the employee is as yet empty twaddle. But some day the two will really be equal.”41 In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the MPA and the Rolph administration had promoted broad-based prosperity, but it was not a prosperity that would be shared equally. Labor signaled its pragmatic acceptance of this arrangement through its dealings with employers, and through the business-oriented administrations of Schmitz and McCarthy. But labor was no longer content with a small share of broad-based prosperity; now labor called for economic equality. Racial equality would have to wait, at least within the boundaries of the Mission.

The WPA and the Politics of Whiteness In the process of respecting the local norms and values of the neighborhood, the WPA, PWA, and USHA also reinforced the exclusions and erasures that characterized the neighborhood. The WPA did, however, make special efforts to celebrate the diversity of the city at large. For example, in 1939 the agency produced a slim volume titled The Festivals of San Francisco, which described the annual celebrations not only of the Spanish, South Americans, and Mexicans but also of the Chinese and Japanese resi-

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dents. These events, the volume announced, were “no more foreign to the city’s life than was the first celebration staged by a foreign group—Jacob Leese’s celebration, sixty years [after the founding of the Mission Dolores], on the Fourth of July, when he ran up the American flag over the second dwelling built on the site of what was still the Mexican frontier village of Yerba Buena.”42 Because of its vigorous support of labor, the WPA was probably the only entity that could have published such things without drawing venom from Organized Labor and the Labor Clarion. But beyond such symbolic gestures, the hiring policies of New Deal agencies were race neutral, and the agencies did employ many Latinos. There were signs that these efforts at least contributed to a new openness among neighborhood residents and institutions. When, in 1934, a culinary workers’ local became the first white-only union to admit Filipinos, “on an equal footing with any other worker irrespective of race, color or creed,” the Labor Clarion reported approvingly that the union had inaugurated “a ‘new deal’ for the workers.”43 The photographic record from the period also shows that a mix of racial groups all marched alongside one another to protest WPA job cuts.44 Beginning in the early 1930s, Missionbased Anglo businesses—dentists, furniture stores, beauty shops, cleaners, and others—started advertising their goods and services in Spanish in El Imparcial. All of these moments suggest that some developments in socioeconomic relations in Chicago were also at work in San Francisco: the privations resulting from the open-shop policies of the 1920s had made white workers and small businesspeople begin to feel solidarity with the nonwhites whom they had recently disdained, and further to demand a new “moral capitalism” that ensured security and some semblance of economic equality.45 With these new attitudes developing, residents and institutions were becoming more receptive to federal nondiscrimination policies. Hiring policies of New Deal agencies were race neutral, and the Radin  Papers contain many interviews with Latinos who were employed on WPA and SERA projects in other parts of San Francisco. Indeed, one of Dr.  Radin’s interviewers was a white-collar Latino, identified only as M. Gómez, who conducted and recorded his or her interviews in Spanish. Records of PWA and WPA projects in the Mission say little about hiring practices, so it may be that Latinos were employed in the neighborhood, but there is no evidence to suggest that was the case. What it is clear is that most of the Mission projects conformed to the neighborhood’s existing discriminatory spatial politics. These politics were expressed not only through public housing tenancy and educational curricula but also through visual representation.

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During the period of the New Deal, the iconography that was associated with the modernist architectural vocabulary was often urban and heroic, featuring industrial laborers rendered in severe angles—as though they, like the buildings they inhabited, had taken on the aspect of machinery (see fig. 6.3). In other works, the imagery was no less celebratory of labor, but was more humanistic, often portraying scenes of multiethnic cooperation. In the New Deal–funded murals at Coit Tower, near San Francisco’s colonia, many of the heroic workers depicted were, judging by phenotype, Latino.46 (See color plates 1 and 2.) By contrast, there were no Latinos represented in Mission projects, unless one counted the 1936 WPA mural dramatizing the founding of the Mission Dolores. Painted by Edith Hamlin in the library of Mission High School, the scene depicted neophyte Indians as noble savages and Spanish missionaries as benevolent bearers of civilization (fig. 6.4). Both Spanish and Indian figures appeared as relics, not as living presences. Like the architecture of the high school itself, this image gave visual form to the imperialist nostalgia expressed in the California Building (1893) at the White City, and the novella The Lure of San Francisco

Figure 6.3. Heroic representation of workers. San Francisco Chronicle, January 29, 1941.

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Figure 6.4. News copy: “Edith Hamlin today adds finishing touches to egg tempera mural in Mission High School, depicting educational activities of Franciscan friars during golden age of San Francisco’s Mission Dolores. Mural subject was actually enacted a few blocks from library where it now appears.” San Francisco Chronicle, September 8, 1937. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, AAB-0385.

(1915): “At the time when you New Englanders were pushing the Indians farther and farther into the wilderness, killing and capturing them, we Californians were drawing them to our missions with gifts and friendship. While you were leaving them in ignorance we were teaching them.”47 The WPA’s Sunshine School, “a school for crippled children,” similarly reca-

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pitulated the neighborhood’s Spanish foundation myth in stucco and red tiles (fig. 6.5). The New Deal is often thought to have produced broadly similar results in cities across the country. This perception is likely due in part to a popular focus on buildings produced in the most recognizable architectural styles. David Gebhard’s famous style designation, “WPA moderne,” has inadvertently contributed to the perception that the work of New Deal agencies was confined to post offices, grade schools, courthouses, and a handful of other civic buildings, all of which were produced in much the same “zigzag” deco style.48 But in fact, New Deal agencies funded the construction of nearly every type of permanent physical artifact that was to be found in American cities at the time, from courthouses and city halls to sewers and sidewalks. In decades hence, the evidence of those projects was pervasive but often invisible to all but those who had participated in the projects themselves.49 The wide functional and stylistic variation among these works reflected variations in local sociopolitical contexts. While a

Figure 6.5. Exterior photograph of Sunshine School, a WPA project, showing tile roofing and other Spanish colonial architectural flourishes. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, AAD-4250.

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New Deal project in the unionist and historically anti-Asiatic Mission District commemorated Samuel Gompers, a vocal opponent of Chinese immigration, another New Deal project in Chinatown commemorated Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, founder of the Chinese Republic.50 Each of these projects was addressed to a different public, and each project helped to symbolically delineate that public.

Conclusion In the decades before the Depression, San Francisco political culture defined publics and public interests at the scale of the neighborhood, and New Deal agencies endeavored to preserve that practice. To do so, the WPA, PWA, and USHA collaborated with local agencies, like the San Francisco Board of Education (in the case of the Gompers School) and the SHFA (in the case of Valencia Gardens). Federal agencies took stock of the sociopolitical and spatial patterns of neighborhoods before approving projects, but citywide agencies drove the determination of what would be built where. In the pre-Depression Mission, the power to make planning decisions effectively rested with business-oriented neighborhood associations like the MPA and later the Mission Merchants, but New Deal– financed interventions reduced those quasi-official entities to interest groups. The school board and the SFHA privileged the interests of labor over business in the Mission, but they did not elevate workers above junior status in the public, either: unionist residents were to be the primary beneficiaries of the decisions made, but they were not themselves the decision makers. Rather than reproducing existing structures of neighborhood authority, or imposing a uniform federal rule over local urban space in San Francisco, agencies like the WPA, PWA, and USHA instead provided an economic and administrative framework through which a citywide scale of authority could be imposed over the Mission for the first time in the twentieth century. At least as a matter of administrative expediency, it is easy to imagine why federal agencies would partner with municipal agencies rather than with the profusion of neighborhood groups, most of which were small and informal, and all of which were—strictly speaking—nongovernmental entities, whatever quasi-governmental functions they may have taken on. In many respects, the New Deal reinvigorated Progressive ideals; but it also dismantled a prominent feature of the Progressive Era San Francisco’s political economy: neighborhood capitalism was untenable in the new, centralized institutional context.

SEVEN

“No-Lining” and Neighborhood Erasure: Washington, D.C., and Downtown San Francisco Come to the Mission While the activities of some New Deal agencies were directed primarily toward public works, the activities of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) were directed toward the private sector, specifically the mortgage and real estate markets. Even though all of these agencies had the effect of scaling planning authority up from the neighborhood to the municipal level, there is an important distinction to be made between the public works agencies and the realestate-oriented agencies. While the former provided urban residents incentives to stay in their older neighborhoods by investing in infrastructure, the latter ultimately provided incentives to leave by making it difficult to secure loans in not all but certainly many such neighborhoods. Because the activities of the real-estate-oriented agencies have not always been well understood—and have recently generated some controversy in the literature—it is necessary to take a close look the FHA and particularly the HOLC, paying special attention to the role of these agencies on the West Coast. This perspective reveals that the practices of federal home finance agencies varied by region in ways that have not yet been appreciated. The HOLC and the FHA did not describe western cities in exactly the same ways that they described cities like Chicago and Philadelphia. Moreover, in smaller cities the corporation seemed more likely to impose federal standards, while in large and economically vibrant cities the HOLC tended to defer to local expertise. This deference helps to explain a surprising finding: that the HOLC described race in very different ways, depending upon region and upon city. For San Francisco all of this meant that the real-estate-oriented agencies did in fact encourage disinvestment, though not in precisely the ways that urban historians have come to expect. While many have portrayed HOLC

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redlining as the death knell of a residential neighborhood, in San Francisco being shaded red on the corporation’s residential security map was a poor predictor of an area’s future prospects. The perennially wealthy, elite Nob Hill was shaded red. The residential areas that could expect significant problems, stemming from a dearth of home financing options, were those that the HOLC did not survey at all—what I call the no-lined areas. In creating its Residential Survey of San Francisco, the HOLC partnered with the city’s largest banks and realtors, nearly all of whom were institutionally and physically downtown entities. Though all of the red-shaded areas could expect at least some mortgages from these lenders, it was the no-lined areas that were truly beyond the pale. The no-lined areas are also a reliable guide to where these downtown entities were hoping to see massive, state-led modernization projects.

The HOLC and the FHA on the West Coast The HOLC was created in 1933, when Congress passed the Home Owners’ Loan Act, with bipartisan support. The corporation’s purpose was to help stabilize the housing market and to assist homeowners in danger of foreclosure by purchasing delinquent loans from lenders. Between 1933 and 1936, the corporation purchased 1,017,821 such loans, “or 1 out of 5 of all mortgages on owner-occupied homes in the nonfarm areas of the nation.”1 These loans were refinanced on generous terms; they were fully amortized over a repayment period of fifteen or twenty-five years, carried 4.5–5 percent interest, and were given on up to 80 percent of the principal. The fully amortized, long-term, low-interest loan was an innovation of the HOLC; a typical mortgage in the 1920s was not amortized, had a shorter repayment period (three to five years), carried a higher interest rate (5 to 9 percent), and covered a smaller percentage of the principal (40 to 50 percent).2 After 1936, the HOLC stopped buying mortgages and directed its energies toward managing its portfolio. In 1951, the corporation wound down its operations, delivering a “nearly $14 million” profit to the federal government.3 The FHA was established by the National Housing Act of 1934, for the purpose of stimulating the lending and construction industries and also, thereby, of alleviating unemployment.4 The agency’s method of accomplishing these aims was not to take on existing loans, but to give private lenders guarantees on new mortgages and property rehabilitation loans, provided they conformed to FHA standards.5 FHA-insured mortgages were modeled off of the long-term, low-interest, amortized loans that the HOLC introduced.6

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Though there are crucial differences between the HOLC and the FHA, in many respects the agencies acted in concert. Collaborating with local lending and real estate interests, the HOLC and FHA rolled out programs that, from a postwar perspective, have been characterized as anti-urban, insofar as they discouraged residential use in older urban areas.7 Aspects of these programs—particularly the HOLC’s programs—did much to stabilize economic conditions in poor, older neighborhoods, but the programs also enabled a centralization of planning authority that would ultimately encourage disinvestment and physical deterioration in those same neighborhoods. Until the 1930s, the Mission District had produced politicians and interest groups that effectively controlled the planning process in the neighborhood. With federal assistance, downtown-based banks and real estate firms now asserted planning authority, advancing a vision of an industrial and commercial future for the Mission—the Mission less as a place to live and more as a production center, shopping hub, and transportation corridor. To tell the story of how this realignment of planning authority was accomplished, this study relies mostly on the records of the HOLC, including the corporation’s internal correspondence, but also and primarily the city survey files.8 The HOLC’s city survey project was undertaken between 1936 and 1940 at the behest of the corporation’s parent organization, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB). It had decided to survey all U.S. cities with populations of at least 40,000, and 239 cities met that criterion.9 Many have suggested that the purpose of the reports was to give the HOLC a better idea about where it should and should not lend. That understanding is mistaken. Although the reports did describe lending risks, the fact is that the HOLC had already made every one of its 1,017,821 loans by the time it began the survey. The survey was not conducted to inform the corporation about where it should make loans, but rather so that it might better understand what it had already bought—and how it might plan to safeguard its investments.10 Each city survey contained a “residential security map,” the purpose of which was to “graphically reflect the trend of desirability in neighborhoods from a residential view-point.”11 The “desirability” of a neighborhood was determined by weighing a number of attributes against one another. These included land use; age and condition of structures; accessibility of transportation, retail, and recreation facilities; ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic characteristics of the population; and lenders’ perceptions of the areas, among other considerations.12 The areas that the HOLC deemed the safest bets for mortgage lending were given an “A” rating and were shaded

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green on the residential security maps; the next-best areas, the “B” areas, were shaded blue; the “C” areas, where cautious lending was advised, were shaded yellow; and those areas that were considered high risks for mortgage lenders were rated “D” and were shaded red. In the “Terminology” section of the San Francisco report, A-rated neighborhoods were defined as “the new well planned sections” that were “homogeneous” in terms of land use and were “not yet fully built up.”13 B areas differed only in that they were slightly older and were now completely built up. C areas were “neighborhoods lacking homogeneity,” some of which could even be described as “Jerry built.” They were “characterized by age, obsolescence, and change of style” and might also suffer from poor services or an “infiltration of a lower grade population.”14 D areas were “those neighborhoods in which the things that are now taking place in the C neighborhoods, have already happened.”15 In order to explain how the HOLC city survey sheds light on the situation in the Mission District, one must understand how the documents were produced, what they contained, and how they should be read. Because a good deal has been written about the HOLC, it is also necessary to review, and in some places revise, the prevailing understandings of the agency, its survey program, and its relationships to both local power structures and other federal agencies. Though the city surveys contain thousands of pages of information about the physical, socioeconomic, and political circumstances of cities in the 1930s, urban historians have so far drawn upon the reports exclusively in discussions about the federal government’s role in promoting residential segregation by ethnicity and race. When historians rediscovered the maps in the 1970s, they connected them to “redlining.”16 This term was coined by housing activists in the 1960s to describe the practice of denying mortgages in certain areas based on neighborhood characteristics, especially the prevalence of racial and ethnic-minority residents.17 That this practice was widespread and common among private lending institutions—and that this segregationist practice was encouraged, and even required by FHA lending guidelines—has been well documented, beginning at least as early as the 1961 Housing Report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.18 However, the HOLC’s record on redlining was paradoxical: even though it identified areas it shaded yellow and red as “hazardous” for lending, the corporation had made a disproportionate number of its own loans in those same C- and D-rated areas.19 In Portland, Oregon, for example, the pattern was clear: the HOLC surveyed 90 residential areas, among which it made 4,169 loans; and the lower the grade of an area, the more likely that

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area was to have received a loan.20 The average D-rated area received four times the number of loans that the average A-rated area received.21 The single area that received the most loans—137—was a D-rated area, the Alberta neighborhood.22 This in spite of the fact that the HOLC report stated that “the racial composition of its [Alberta’s] population is subversive”: black and Russian.23 While some have suggested that C- and D-rated areas “virtually never received HOLC loans,” all of the sustained studies of the HOLC find a lending pattern that is comparable to Portland: in Chicago and Newark, 60 percent of HOLC loans went to C- and D-rated areas; in Memphis, 68 percent of the loans went to C- and D-rated areas; in Philadelphia, more than 60  percent of HOLC loans went just to D-rated areas, and another 20 percent went to C-rated areas.24 In other words, the HOLC itself did not “redline,” at least not in the original sense of the term when it was coined during the civil rights movement: the HOLC shaded areas of its map red to indicate a high lending risk, then proceeded to lend freely in those areas.25 Moreover, a sample of HOLC loans in Philadelphia showed that many loans went to immigrants, and that 9.9 percent of the sampled loans went to African Americans.26 The 1940 census reported that 5 percent of HOLC loans nationwide went to African Americans, even though only 3.5 percent of the country’s African American population owned homes.27 Though all of the sustained studies of the HOLC acknowledge that the corporation lent in areas it shaded red, most come to the conclusion that the HOLC was still largely responsible for the practice of redlining. Even though its own lending record was color-blind, and even though private lenders had been denying loans based on neighborhood characteristics long before the HOLC was created, the corporation did codify and institutionalize segregationist appraisal practices, essentially providing the federal government’s blessing to those practices.28 Just as the FHA adopted the HOLC’s standard loan formula, so it adopted the HOLC’s appraisal methods. The difference, according to the major studies, was that unlike the HOLC, the FHA did deny help to older urban areas, especially African American and ethnic-minority neighborhoods. Private lenders followed suit.29 Two theses here require further scrutiny: the first is that the HOLC’s appraisal practices contributed to subsequent redlining by the FHA; the second is that the HOLC’s appraisal practices contributed to subsequent redlining by private lenders. Let us take the second thesis first. There has been some suggestion that this proposition is mistaken, that the HOLC should not be seen as a major influence on private lenders, since it was

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FHLBB policy that the maps be kept confidential and not be allowed to “fall into private hands.”30 However, this appears to be a case where official policy bore little relation to actual practice. A review of the corporation’s surveys of West Coast cities suggests that private lenders not only had access to the residential security maps but in some cities were intimately involved with the creation of those maps. In Oakland, for example, field agent T. H. Bowden enlisted twelve local “executives of real estate and mortgage institutions” that were willing to participate in the report.31 “Knowing something of the caliber of this club, I consider it a real opportunity,” Bowden wrote to Corwin Fergus, acting director of the Division of Research and Statistics.32 This group of local executives actually created the first draft of the residential security areas, which did not correspond to census tracts, supervisorial districts, or any other official mapping, but reflected only the local real estate establishment’s ideas about where coherent residential areas could be identified. After the draft was made, HOLC staff went “over each of the areas submitted, eliminating any inconsistencies.” A map was then “constructed” and “submitted for criticism and advice, to leading real estate firms and mortgage institutions of the East Bay Section. This process of refinement will be carried on until all differences are composed.”33 In other words, local lending institutions were not merely consulted on the features of the map—they actually drafted the map and then worked with the HOLC at every stage to refine it.34 Internal correspondence shows that local realtors, bankers, and appraisers were also intimately involved in producing the report for San Francisco.35 In Los Angeles, the story was different. Internal correspondence reveals that local lenders in that city had little to do with the making of the HOLC map—in fact, field agent Bowden wrote that he had had a “most exasperating time” convincing the larger banks to share even basic information, so he relied upon the agency’s own loan-servicing officers for insights into the city.36 But Los Angeles was the clear exception. There has also been some suggestion that when field agents referred to the opinions that lenders expressed about specific areas on the HOLC’s maps, the agents might have been extrapolating, since the lenders themselves were not privy to the actual maps.37 The San Francisco survey, however, leaves no room for doubt: the local lenders’ extensive responses all appear within quotation marks, and all refer specifically to the Residential Security Map. An interview with William Arnold, assistant vice president of the Anglo National California Bank, was typical: “Referring to the Security Area Map of San Francisco shown us, we would say that we will make residential loans upon our maximum terms in all the ‘green’ areas

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shown except A-4 and A-6.”38 The institutions interviewed accounted for nearly 100 percent of the non-HOLC mortgages in San Francisco, so there is no question that the local lending establishment had access to the maps. Again, those large lending institutions were largely responsible for determining where the lines would be drawn in the first place.39 So it appears that the accepted story about the relationship between the HOLC and private lenders is essentially correct: private lenders did redline long before the HOLC existed; but while the HOLC itself did not redline, it did give the federal government’s blessing to this practice. However, the other popular thesis—basically that the FHA redlined because the HOLC taught it how—appears to be on much shakier ground. Before the HOLC survey began, the FHA already had lending guidelines, complete with a neighborhood-risk rating system that used the same lettering scheme as the HOLC. Scholars widely acknowledge that Homer Hoyt’s ecological theories about urban structure and growth provided the intellectual underpinnings of the HOLC’s city survey program, and Hoyt worked for the FHA, not the HOLC, as principal housing economist. He issued guidelines called “The Preparation of Maps Showing the Dynamic Factors of City Growth” for the FHA in early 1935—again, before the HOLC survey began.40 Some versions of these FHA maps used red to indicate lending risk, as the HOLC’s later would.41 As one scholar has observed, it seems likely the FHA influenced the HOLC more than the HOLC influenced the FHA.42 But if the earliest impetus for systematic appraisals did come from the FHA, there is also evidence that the HOLC soon led the way on appraisal practices, at least in its own estimation. In its internal communications, the HOLC pointed to the fact that outside federal agencies turned to it when they needed appraisals done. The corporation employed at least eight staff members who devoted “their entire time to performing appraisal services for other governmental agencies.”43 By August 1944, the HOLC had done 857 appraisals for fifteen outside agencies.44 The majority of those appraisals were done for the U.S. Navy, the War Department, and the Department of Justice.45 The HOLC viewed its own valuations as the standard for the United States government.46 In a 1944 internal study, the HOLC compared its appraisal methods with those of the FHA and found that its own were more rigorous, detailed, and reliable than the FHA’s, partly because the HOLC recorded more comprehensive neighborhood data.47 HOLC officials also openly worried that FHA appraisals were uneven and tended to inflate prices—a practice that allowed residential builders to profiteer and threatened to reproduce a 1920s-style housing bubble.48 When in 1936 President Roosevelt urged Senator Robert Wagner to put forward a bill consolidating

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the activities of the HOLC and the FHA, HOLC officials expressed distaste at the prospect; as one official put it, “our Division has it all over anything which the FHA does along the same lines.”49 There was an institutional rivalry between the HOLC and the FHA, and both were well aware of what the other was doing. In fact, their operations were often intertwined. In 1943, Asa Groves, the HOLC’s chief appraiser, estimated that 35 percent of the corporation’s contract appraisers also did appraisals for the FHA.50 Regional FHA officials were named as local collaborators on HOLC city surveys of Northern Californian and Pacific Northwest cities.51 In Portland, the HOLC field agent did not conduct his own survey until “after he reviewed gradings of the city made by the FHA.”52 So the simple thesis that the HOLC showed the FHA how to redline is clearly mistaken—the picture was much more complex. But while it may be impossible to determine which of the two agencies was most culpable for promoting segregationist appraisal practices, it is still very clear that both of them were. At the national level, the fundamental difference between the two agencies was where their money went. Not only did the HOLC buy a disproportionate number of loans in poor and minority neighborhoods, but it also undertook an extensive reconditioning program and a limited neighborhood rehabilitation program. The HOLC provided more than a million mortgages, but as of April 1941, it had also granted more than 800,000 smaller loans, totaling $80 million, for physical improvements like painting, plumbing, and roofing.53 Given the distribution of its mortgages, it is likely that a high percentage of these reconditioning loans went to redshaded areas. The corporation’s more ambitious but ultimately more limited neighborhood rehabilitation program was oriented toward “the prevention of blight which annually destroys many hundreds of millions of dollars in home investments.”54 The strategy for preventing blight was to study a neighborhood and create a master plan that made specific recommendations as to “building improvements, street adjustments, and zoning.”55 The improvements themselves were to be executed by local agencies and by local homeowners, using financing from local lenders.56 In the end, the HOLC executed rehabilitation projects in only three neighborhoods, one each in Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.57 As HOLC officials understood, most of its properties were “well over twenty years in age and largely in neighborhoods rapidly declining in desirability”—C- and D-rated areas—so its reconditioning and rehabilitation programs were clearly oriented toward securing its own investments.58

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Still, the fact that the corporation invested in these programs demonstrates that it did not accept the ecological view of neighborhoods as organisms with an immutable life cycle.59 Where sound policy was applied, neighborhoods need not “die.” By contrast, the FHA did indeed subscribe to Hoyt’s ecological theories. Accordingly, FHA guarantees went overwhelmingly to detached single-family houses in suburban locations, favoring new construction over rehabilitation and thereby precipitating the decline of older urban areas.60 While this analysis seems to be correct, it is important to note that the FHA has a much longer record than the HOLC, stretching from 1934 to the time of this writing, and scholarship has tended to focus on the FHA’s long-term impact in the postwar period rather than on its earliest lending activity. At its establishment, the FHA’s stated mandate was to “sell property owners on the idea of spending money for repairs and improvements even if they had to borrow it; and to sell lending institutions on making consumer credit loans up to $2,000 in amount without collateral.”61 The first FHA-guaranteed home improvement (Title I) loan was made in August 1934, and by the end of the year the agency had guaranteed 73,000 such loans, which by the FHA’s own estimates had “generated” over “$210 million of modernization and repair work.”62 By its very nature, this investment in rehabilitation favored existing urban areas over new suburban construction. In San Francisco, there is evidence that the FHA’s early mortgage guarantees (Title II loans) also favored older urban areas: the HOLC’s detailed study of the lending market in San Francisco found that from 1934 through the first four months of 1937, the vast majority of FHA-guaranteed mortgages were made in the city itself, rather than “in nearby suburban communities.”63 Of the $23,390,800 total lent, $22,191,900 was lent within San Francisco.64 There were 4,578 such mortgages, “of which 871 were for new construction, 434 for new houses less than 12 months old, and 3,273 existing construction.”65 In other words, only 19 percent of early FHA-guaranteed mortgages in San Francisco went to new construction, while about 72 percent went to houses that were more than a year old. This distribution strongly suggests that early Title II loans went to the central city rather than surrounding suburbs; and even within the city, those loans favored older urban areas—areas that tended to receive lower residential security grades—over newer, more suburban parts of the city itself. This stands in striking contrast to better-studied cities like Chicago, where about .008 percent of early FHA-guaranteed mortgages went to the central city.66 Existing studies have by and large taken a long view, a postwar perspective,

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of the FHA, and from that perspective it appears that this private-marketoriented agency encouraged devastating disinvestment in older urban areas. But when one considers the agency from a 1930s perspective, it is clear that the FHA, like the HOLC, favored older urban areas, at least in San Francisco.

Variation in the Meaning of Race in HOLC and FHA Practices Many have observed that race and ethnicity were crucial factors in the FHA’s and especially the HOLC’s appraisals of lending risk. The determination of which areas would receive C and D ratings on HOLC maps in Chicago, Detroit, Newark, St. Louis, and Philadelphia all “depended very heavily on race and ethnicity.” Scholars have suggested that race was “key” in Los Angeles, too, where seventy-one of the seventy-three D-rated areas were populated with racial minorities.67 In San Francisco, the story was very different. There, only two of the seventeen D-rated areas were home to racial minorities.68 Three more red-shaded areas in San Francisco were described as being under threat of “racial infiltration,” but the remaining twelve D-rated areas were described as white.69 Six of these noted the presence of Europeans, but only once with any apparently negative connotation: in the Potrero Hill neighborhood, a “concentration of ‘red Russians’ and other foreign elements” were noted.70 In the remaining five areas, a European population was identified in an apparently neutral tone, as in the description of the Bernal Heights neighborhood noting that “many nationalities are represented, but there is no inharmonious racial concentration.”71 The “Definitions of Terminology” section of the San Francisco HOLC survey clearly laid out the report’s orientation toward questions of race and ethnicity in a passage stating that the (unwieldy) phrase “‘Inharmonious or Undesirable Foreign Elements and Racial Concentrations’ has reference only to the ‘colored’ races: Chinese, Japanese, Negroes, and Mexicans of mixed Indian extraction, as no other races as such are considered inharmonious or undesirable by residents of San Francisco” (emphasis original).72 A concentration of Poles and Lithuanians might be sufficient reason to shade an area red in Chicago.73 But in San Francisco, such “foreign elements” were not necessarily “inharmonious or undesirable.” Indeed, a foreign presence was sometimes a selling point, as in a B-rated section in the Marina District: “many of the higher type Italians are residents of the area, and property located here is readily saleable.”74 Since only two of the seventeen D-rated areas hosted an “inharmonious racial concentration,” it is clear that race was not the key in San Francisco. What all of the D-rated areas did have in common was mixed, or “het-

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erogeneous,” land use. Even upscale white neighborhoods like Nob Hill— arguably the city’s most fashionable address—were given a D rating for mixed use. The description of that area noted that it contained “a heterogeneous mix of industry, business, hotels, apartments, and flats.”75 It did not matter that the neighborhood was occupied by “high-grade apartment houses, hotels, etc.”—the very fact of heterogeneous land use guaranteed a D rating.76 While HOLC documents related to Los Angeles noted that a Mexican presence constituted “the really troubling racial problem” in that city, internal correspondence about San Francisco did not discuss race at all.77 Rather, field agent Bowden complained to his superiors in Washington that mixed land use had made the San Francisco survey “a ‘dog fight’ all the way. If I had to describe San Francisco in one word, it would be ‘heterogeneous.’ A good part of the residential district [meaning all residential areas] is a mixed-up mess. . . . She’s tough, boy, she’s tough!”78 Indeed, land use was noted in the definitions of the security grades. Green-shaded areas were defined as “homogeneous” and not yet built out, while yellow- and red-shaded areas were those “lacking homogeneity.”79 The yellow- and redshaded areas may or may not have hosted an “undesirable population,” but they all lacked homogeneous land use.80 In San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, the HOLC reports displayed much more anxiety about labor than about race.81 This is not to say that race was a neutral factor in San Francisco real estate; residential segregation was a reality. Racial covenants were common in the western neighborhoods, while in neighborhoods like the Mission, many racist everyday cultural practices reinforced spatial boundaries. As the HOLC report makes clear, the “racial concentrations” in the Fillmore were not happenstance: “City authorities, in cooperation with the various community and civic organizations, have for many years past stringently sought to confine those inharmonious colored elements to certain districts. As a result of these efforts, the Negro population of San Francisco is largely confined to area ‘D-1’ on the Security Area Map.”82 However, considering that many more white neighborhoods received a D rating, it is also clear that race was one among many factors—and not the most important one—in determining where red lines would be drawn. It should be noted that the Fillmore neighborhood (areas D-1 and D-3) scored very low on every other measure also, a fact that clearly illustrated the significant correspondence among poverty, race, and a deteriorating physical environment. But if a wealthy white neighborhood contained mixed land use, it too would be given a D rating and shaded red. This stands in contrast to cities east of the Rockies. The Lincoln Terrace neighborhood of St. Louis—a

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neighborhood of new, good-quality bungalows—received a D rating for no reason other than a concentration of African Americans.83 In Detroit every “neighborhood with even a tiny African American population was rated ‘D,’ or ‘hazardous.’”84 The story appears to be different on the West Coast, where neighborhoods with substantial African American populations in Portland and Spokane might be given a C or even a B rating.85 There are many variations to be observed in the HOLC reports during the 1930s, variations that seem to be explained by region, and by size and relative economic importance of the cities surveyed. On the question of ethnicity, region seemed to have been the key variable. While many European nationalities were racialized in Chicago or Philadelphia, they were regarded as close enough to white in San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. The HOLC report on the latter city neatly summarizes the corporation’s own perception of regional variance: Seattle, being a typical Western city, has a distinctly cosmopolitan viewpoint and is essentially democratic in its thought and customs. With the exception of the Negroes, Indians, Mexicans and Orientals (including Filipinos), families are appraised, largely, by their individual conduct rather than on a basis of racial affinity; and while there are certain sections of the city where one race or another is more or less dominant, these slight concentrations have little, if any, effect upon residential real estate values.86

The report goes on to cite the Italian presence in the North Beacon Hill area, pointing out that “no one seems to believe that this has any bearing on residential real estate values in that section.”87 Regional variation comes into sharp focus when one considers how Mexicans were treated in HOLC and FHA materials. Hoyt’s One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago—a text that was foundational to federal appraisal practices—ranked racial and ethnic groups in terms of the influence they exerted on real estate values. He found that “English, German, Scotch, Irish, [and] Scandinavians” had the most salutary effects, while Mexicans had the most detrimental effect; blacks ranked second to last.88 In the FHA’s survey of Chicago, not all areas with black residents were given a D rating, but all Mexican neighborhoods “were exclusively graded D.”89 In Los Angeles, HOLC officials stated that the city’s large Mexican population constituted “the really troubling racial problem.”90 This racial anxiety was expressed in sometimes virulent language, as in the area description of the Latino neighborhood of San Gabriel Wash, which noted an “infiltration of goats, rabbits, and dark skinned babies.”91 The contrast in tone between the

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Los Angeles and San Francisco reports is striking. The Los Angeles report was written by T. H. Bowden, the same field agent who began the San Francisco report with a familiar parable of a romantic Spanish past. The first paragraph of the “History” section of the HOLC report reads, in its entirety: Don Caspar de Portola discovered the Bay in 1769, and Colonel Juan Bautista de Anza founded the Presidio of San Francisco in 1776, shortly before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. These two incidents in themselves had no economic significance, but the fact that they presaged the development of San Francisco and the Bay Region generally, by a Latin people whose habits, customs, and temperament have been handed down as a heritage from generation to generation, has done much to shape the destiny of the city both culturally and physically. To this background can be attributed the fiesta spirit which pervades the city upon the slightest pretext and adds so much to its glamour and charm. To this inheritance also may be ascribed the growth of a cultural atmosphere which has made San Francisco the center of what might well be termed a western school of literature, music, and art. These have all contributed greatly in making San Francisco what it is today.92

As in the 1915 novella The Lure of San Francisco, in which the blue-eyed heroine claims Spanish heritage, field agent Bowden here Americanized “Latin people.” References to the Declaration of Independence and 1776 seemed to sanitize the foreign influence on the city, making it safe to acknowledge and celebrate that influence. Such a passage could never have appeared in the Los Angeles report, in spite of the fact that both reports were authored by the same person. The variation is explained by the agent’s acknowledgment of regional context. Again, in San Francisco the HOLC narrowly defined inharmonious racial groups and foreign elements as “Chinese, Japanese, Negroes, and Mexicans of mixed Indian extraction, as no other races as such are considered inharmonious or undesirable by residents of San Francisco.”93 “Mexican” was the only designation left open to interpretation. Reflecting the same racial politics apparent in the Radin Papers (and, in all likelihood, in the tenancy of Valencia Gardens), not all Mexicans were considered “colored”—only “Mexicans of mixed Indian extraction.” The HOLC report explicitly referred to both “Porto Ricans” and “Mexican-Spanish” residents as “white.”94 In fact, the designation of Mexican—as inharmonious racial category—was invoked only once in the survey of San Francisco, in the Fill-

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more. There black and Japanese concentrations were also noted, and the term was qualified as “Mexican hybrid.”95 There were four residential security areas entirely or partly within the Mission District: two were C-rated (shaded yellow on the map) and two were D-rated (shaded red on the map).96 Both the D-rated areas were shaded red not because of a nonwhite population but because of mixed use, “improvements [that] consist of an inharmonious conglomeration of old houses, bungalows, flats, and apartments, sprinkled with shops, markets, and small industrial establishments.”97 The WPA’s “Real Property Survey,” city directories, and the Spanish-language press all provide evidence of a sizable and visible Mexican population in both D-rated areas, if not also in the yellow-shaded, C-rated areas. For example, La Morena grocery was located within a D-rated area in the western Mission, as was the Latino handyman who lived around the corner, while La Iglesia Bautista Mexicana was located in the central D-rated area. However, the HOLC report described all four of these areas as white.98 The description of the southern D-rated area seemed to obliquely acknowledge an ambiguous racial presence: “Many nationalities are represented, but there is no racial concentration, in the broad sense of the term” (emphasis mine).99 This language seemed to imply that in a narrower sense of the term, there was a racial concentration. The HOLC map is one of the clearest indications that, in the context of real estate, Latinos had an ambiguous racial status in San Francisco: they might be regarded as “colored” or as white, depending on the circumstance or interests of the observer. The Radin Papers, Spanish-language newspapers, and city directories confirm that there were some Latino businesses in the Fillmore. But as one Mexican American who owned a grocery store in the area noted, there was “not any too much competition.”100 The Mexican population of the Mission was almost certainly larger than whatever Mexican population clustered in the Fillmore. This demonstrates that local lenders perceived the Fillmore Mexicans to be of “mixed Indian extraction,” while the Mission Mexicans were not—and were therefore not to be regarded as “colored” (in spite of the presence of a grocery called La Morena, the Dark-Skinned Woman, in the Mission). To understand Latinos’ ambiguous racial status, it is important to note that in the early decades of the state’s history, Californios had real standing in the political system, even holding many elected offices.101 Their power was partly a consequence of the fact that the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo stipulated that the Mexicans living in ceded territory would be

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considered white. The treaty also helps to explain why the United States census continued to count Latinos as white even as they became a highly racialized population in most places by the early twentieth century. One prominent historian of Latino history has described this racial status as “off-white, sometimes defined as legally white, almost always defined as socially nonwhite.”102 While this status was often marked by exclusions, Latinos’ provisionally white status actually afforded them inclusion in at least one important arena of socioeconomic life in San Francisco. Surprisingly, when it came to real estate in 1930s San Francisco, Latinos were not so much “off white” as they were close-enough-to-white. And because they were close-enough-to-white, so-called Latin or Spanish populations were not regarded as a lending risk, as such. Advertisements in the Spanish-language press provide further evidence that San Francisco lenders and realtors did indeed court the city’s Latinos. The Anglo Land Company advertised properties for sale, in Spanish, in El Imparcial.103 The improved properties listed ranged from $1,000 to $3,500; the latter figure could have purchased a house in good condition in many of the yellow-lined areas, and even some of the blue-lined areas, on the HOLC map.104 Eleven of the thirty-four improved properties listed were going for more than $3,000, suggesting that the company was targeting a middle-class Latino demographic as well as the upwardly mobile working class. In 1935, Bank of America placed Spanish-language advertisements in the same paper announcing that the bank was authorized by the federal government to make home loans under the National Housing Act of 1934; in other words, the bank was advertising FHA loans to Latinos.105 (See fig. 7.1.) The bank even had a “Spanish and Latino-American Department” with its own staff. The imagery in this advertisement is significant: while the fantasy of the Spanish hacienda seems, ironically, to have been reserved for upwardly mobile Anglo populations (as it was in the exclusively white Mission Terrace development), upwardly mobile Latinos were courted with fantasies of a half-timbered, northern European country life, a house that might symbolically whiten whoever occupied it. Bank of America was one of the “best qualified local” entities that had helped field agent Bowden draw the residential security area lines, and it also held more residential mortgages than any other lender in the city. With such a sizable and visible Latino middle class, it was simply good business to lend to Latinos. The WPA “Real Property Survey” described the Mission areas as containing a sizable nonwhite population. But the HOLC area description of the western Mission District stated that lenders were still “very favorably disposed” toward the neighborhood, so it would not

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Figure 7.1. This Spanish-language Bank of America advertisement from 1935 announces that the bank is making loans for the purchase, construction, and modernization of homes under the National Housing Act of 1934. “Buy . . . Build . . . Modernize. Loans for Residences. The Bank of America—an institution authorized by the government to make loans under the National Housing Act [of 1934]—is making loans for the modernization of residences, rural houses and business properties, and also for the construction or purchase of new residential properties. Complete information can be obtained in any Bank of America branch.” Not only do the Bank of America advertisements illustrate that FHA loans were likely available to Latinos, but they also illustrate the FHA’s focus on rehabilitation. El Imparcial, February 1, 1935, 4.

have been in the economic interests of local lenders and realtors to invoke “Mexican” as an inharmonious racial category there.106 Latinos’ status with local lenders not only highlights regional variances in the HOLC reports but might also point to regional variance in the FHA’s practices. While it is very difficult to know how many FHAguaranteed loans were made to San Francisco Latinos in the 1930s, the fact that the city’s largest lender courted that demographic suggests that San Francisco Latinos likely received more government-backed loans than did their co-ethnics in Los Angeles (where Mexicans were explicitly racialized) or Chicago (where lenders saw Mexicans at the very bottom of the racial hierarchy). In the Mission, as in San Francisco at large, Latinos’ ambiguous status was a mixed blessing. The fact that the real estate establishment did not ac-

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knowledge a Latino presence in the Mission meant that the Mexican newcomers were not eligible for public housing, as Mexicans, but that they were eligible as a close-enough-to-white population. As such, they had access to home loans that were apparently more restricted for the “colored” races. Their invisibility as Mexicans also apparently prevented the kind of precipitous disinvestment that would shake the D-rated African American neighborhoods, like the nearby Fillmore, over the coming decades. The new Gompers School, located across the street from La Morena grocery, would not cater to Mexicans’ needs, as Mexicans (and in fact taught an implicitly anti-immigrant curriculum), but Mexicans were presumably free to enroll and to absorb an assimilationist message. They were invisible, but visibility could sometimes be a trap—as it was for the Chinese laundrymen living in the Mission in decades prior, and for the Angelino Mexicans and Mexican Americans who were targeted for repatriation by U.S. Immigration during the 1930s because of their conspicuous presence in La Plaza in downtown Los Angeles.107 A comparison between Los Angeles and San Francisco demonstrates how the HOLC treated the politics of ethnicity differently by region, but there are other variations to be observed. The size and relative economic importance of a city also apparently affected how the HOLC would describe that city. Consider, for example, a comparison between the emerging global cities of San Francisco and Seattle and the regional financial centers of Portland, Tacoma, and Spokane. The HOLC reports on San Francisco and Seattle abound in general praise for the vitality of those cities, and the descriptions clearly deferred to the expertise of local lenders and realtors; the same cannot be said about the smaller cities. For example, the HOLC not only respected but even celebrated the “cosmopolitan” attitudes about ethnicity in San Francisco and Seattle, where Italians were not regarded as a detrimental influence on real estate values. Lenders and realtors in Portland seemed to hold comparable attitudes about ethnicity, but the HOLC was less inclined to defer. Bowden—the same field agent who produced the reports on Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle—described a 25 percent Italian neighborhood in Portland as a threat to surrounding property values, then went on to complain that it “is not believed that this situation is generally known even among real estate brokers. Certainly none with which the matter was discussed showed any great concern.”108 In San Francisco and Seattle, Bowden described concentrations of Italians as a benefit, or at least as a neutral factor, to real estate values and praised the local lack of prejudice as “cosmopolitan” and “democratic.” In Portland, by contrast, Bowden presented the lack of concern

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about Italians as ignorance of “jeopardy.”109 So while the local attitudes about Italians and real estate seemed to be comparable in San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland, the HOLC only respected those attitudes in the larger cities. This analysis suggests the possibility that the smaller and less economically influential the city, the more likely the the HOLC was to apply nationally determined norms to that city; conversely, the larger and more important the city, the more likely the HOLC would be to respect local attitudes. While that thesis remains to be tested, it is clear for the purposes of the present study that the HOLC did not always apply uniform standards, in a uniform manner, to cities across the country. While it is easy to find examples of an HOLC official saying that he was “extremely anxious that these maps present as much uniformity as possible between cities,” it may be that the HOLC official doth protest too much—if the task of producing uniform reports was going according to plan, then why feel “extremely anxious”?110 There is no reason to assume that the corporation succeeded in this aim, or even that all of its operatives took the mandate seriously. All of these variations suggest that it is a mistake to abstract a national story from any single one of these reports, or even from a regional group of reports. In Detroit, HOLC funds “were unencumbered by local politics,” meaning that the agency applied national standards with little regard for the opinions of local stakeholders.111 That may have been the case in a city like Portland, yet it clearly was not so in Oakland, San Francisco, or Seattle. Perhaps the most canonical study of the HOLC concludes by insisting on a “simple fact”: “the various government policies toward housing have had substantially the same result from Los Angeles to Boston.”112 That analysis was based on St. Louis, Newark, and Memphis, but why presume that those cities of the Northeast and industrial Midwest could stand in for the entire country? The HOLC surveyed 239 cities, and only a handful of the reports have been analyzed in any depth. A review of the HOLC’s operations suggests a couple of things about how to read the city survey. First, it is impossible to understand the features of the San Francisco survey only with reference to the better-studied reports, like those of St. Louis, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Second, because local lenders and realtors were closely involved with the creation of the HOLC survey of San Francisco, and because the HOLC deferred to local expertise, the San Francisco report can be taken as a reliable index of the attitudes and opinions of the city’s prominent realtors and lenders. (This would not likely be true for a city like Los Angeles, where the local establishment was less cooperative, or Portland, where the HOLC was less in-

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clined to defer to local expertise.) The San Francisco report strove to “represent a fair and composite opinion of the best qualified local people.”113 For the study of the Mission District, in particular, the HOLC report demonstrates that the San Francisco real estate establishment ascribed to Latinos the same ambiguous racial status that many local Latinos ascribed to themselves: “Latin” or “Spanish” was close-enough-to-white, while “Indian hybrid” was “colored.” But the survey says something else about the real estate establishment’s view of the Mission District that is not immediately apparent.

No-Lining and the Centralization of Planning Authority A close look at the HOLC residential security map reveals that most of the neighborhood was rendered in white, with white designating “Industrial/ Commercial” areas. (See color plate 4.) In spite of that designation, Sanborn fire insurance maps illustrate that huge swaths of unshaded areas throughout the city, including the Mission, were largely residential. For example, the fire insurance map of the area bounded by Mission, Eleventh, Howard, and Twelfth Streets, in the northern part of the neighborhood: in terms of square footage, about half of the area was occupied by apartments, flats, and single-family dwellings. However, these homes were interspersed not only with stores (as was typical in D-rated areas) but also with a sheet metal works, tool and die manufacturing, tire service, and other light industrial uses.114 Many of the other non-shaded areas throughout the city contained a high percentage of single-family detached houses. The WPA’s “1939 Real Property Survey” and its 1937 traffic survey both confirm that many of these same areas were ethnically white and owner occupied.115 The difference was that these dwellings were more likely to be located near a garment factory, bakery, or printing press than were their counterparts in the surveyed areas. I use the term no-lining to describe this practice of designating largely residential areas as Industrial/Commercial. HOLC redlining has sometimes been portrayed as the death knell of residential lending in a neighborhood, but in San Francisco, at least, that distinction belongs to the practice of no-lining. The HOLC conducted interviews with all of the San Francisco lending institutions that held even a handful of mortgages, asking where in the city they were willing to lend. Each D-rated area was mentioned by at least one lender; but not a single lender mentioned a no-lined area. As in other cities, red-shaded areas typically did receive loans—not only from the HOLC but also from private banks. The description of the D-rated area in the

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western Mission noted, “Officials of mortgage institutions are very favorably disposed towards the Mission District.”116 Even the D-rated areas of the Fillmore found willing lenders. In fact, A. P. Giannini, the chairman of the Bank of America, insisted that “residential loans be made to worthy people in all districts,” even though loans in the Fillmore “would be very much modified as to terms.”117 In other words, the city’s largest residential lender—the Bank of America, which held 11,231 mortgages in San Francisco—lent in the black and Japanese Fillmore District, but probably not in the white and close-enough-to-white northern Mission, which was no-lined.118 The local real estate establishment was closely involved in laying out the residential security areas for the HOLC. The associated report represented a “composite opinion of the best qualified local people,” a list that included R. G. Hamilton & Co. Real Estate, Thomas Magee & Sons Real Estate, the Crocker First National Bank, the San Francisco Bank, and the Bank of America.119 So it is perhaps not surprising that local mortgage institutions were lending in all of the D-rated areas—red lines did not indicate where the establishment was unwilling to lend; rather, they indicated the threshold of where the establishment was willing to lend. So the red-shaded Fillmore could receive loans, while the no-lined northern Mission was beyond the pale for the local real estate establishment—despite the fact that the former was black and the latter white. Had the primary purpose of HOLC redlining been to warn lenders away from minority neighborhoods, then San Francisco’s Chinatown— infamous among housing inspectors and the Public Health Department, as well as the public at large—would certainly have been shaded red. Instead, the neighborhood appeared blank on the map. This fact points to the possibility that no-lining sometimes exhibited a racial logic. Chinese residents occupied the lowest position in the local racial hierarchy, and the most prominent Chinese neighborhood was no-lined, marking it out as an unacceptable lending risk. However, the neighborhood also exhibited a high degree of mixed use, the feature that bound all of the no-lined residential areas together. Many of the areas that appeared blank on the map, like downtown and the eastern waterfront, were indeed overwhelmingly commercial and industrial. But many of the other no-lined areas, like the northern Mission and the entire South of Market District, were heavily residential. A review of contemporaneous planning documents explains why. The comparison brings into focus the fact that the HOLC map was not purely descriptive but also aspirational. The same year that the HOLC produced its report,

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the WPA published its Report on San Francisco Citywide Traffic Survey. Like the HOLC report, the WPA document reflected the ideas of the local establishment, particularly its sponsoring agency, the San Francisco Department of Public Works. The report included a “Limited Way Plan” that proposed that five different freeways intersect in the no-lined areas of the northern Mission District.120 Another traffic hub would be built in the no-lined South of Market, and the terminus of the no-lined strip of western Market Street corresponded precisely to the point at which an elevated freeway would have become a surface limited way. A no-lined strip of the Richmond District also corresponded roughly to a freeway that was proposed for that neighborhood. (Compare color plate 4 with fig. 7.2.) This plan

Figure 7.2. The WPA’s 1937 “Limited Way Plan” for San Francisco. The inset area shows a detail of the proposed intersection of five different freeways in the northern Mission District— the same basic circulation scheme that was originally proposed in the Burnham plan. The two freeways that run north–south through the length of the neighborhood correspond exactly to the no-lined strips of the Mission visible in color plate 2. Miller McClintock, “A Limited Way Plan,” in WPA, A Report on San Francisco Citywide Traffic Survey, 1937, 241.

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would have transformed the northern Mission into the central hub for vehicular traffic for all of San Francisco. Comparing the HOLC map with the WPA freeway plan, it becomes clear that the two no-lined corridors on either side of the Mission areas of D-12 and D-13 corresponded exactly with two freeways that connected downtown San Francisco to the peninsula communities to the south. The HOLC map and report is the most concise index of the ambitions of prominent downtown lenders and realtors. The map and report presented not only a “composite opinion” about the city’s present but also a composite view of the plans and aspirations that these downtown interests had for the future of broader San Francisco. Absent from the list of local collaborators was any entity based in or claiming to represent the Mission or any other neighborhood. Moreover, William Crocker, the president of the Crocker Bank and son of Charles Crocker (one of the Big Four of the Southern Pacific Railroad), was a prominent open-shop crusader who had run for mayor against McCarthy, a fact that likely made him unpopular in the unionist Mission.121 Many of the interests that appeared on the list, like the Crocker and Magee family businesses, had been associated with the cause of instituting citywide planning in San Francisco dating back to the  Burnham plan—Thomas Magee actually sat on the Committee of Forty.122 In fact, a comparison of the Burnham plan and the 1937 limited way plan shows that the latter document employed many of the same ideas as the former. Both plans, for example, would have used the northern Mission as a transportation hub. (Compare northern Mission detail of fig. 7.2 with fig.  2.3.) A fairly close correspondence between no-lined areas and later freeway routes can also be observed in Seattle, Portland, and Tacoma.123 Further research would be needed to determine whether the correspondence was incidental in those cities, but the comparison of the Burnham plan and the limited way plan strongly suggests that the correspondence was not incidental in San Francisco. When it came to the prospects for Mission residents and the built environment in which they lived, the HOLC city survey charted a troubling future. A small sliver of the western area of the Mission was given a C rating; three areas were given a D rating, but more than half of the neighborhood was no-lined. Residents in the D-rated areas could hope to receive generous HOLC mortgages as well as private loans from some traditional banks, though the latter would likely be on modified terms (higher interest rates and shorter repayment periods); residents of the larger no-lined areas would have a difficult time securing a mortgage from anyone, on any terms. The no-lined areas were targeted for state-led modernization proj-

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ects, and for private conversion into homogenous industrial and commercial uses. Since it was large local lenders who determined that the northern Mission should be no-lined, and since the HOLC map was well known to all San Francisco lenders, it is unlikely that any institution would have seen a mortgage in the northern Mission as a sound investment. That included the Bank of California—the new occupant of the old Mission Bank building—whose officials explicitly stated that they were unwilling to lend in the D-rated area in the central Mission and, by implication, were also unwilling to lend in any of the no-lined areas of the neighborhood.124 While the shaded areas of the HOLC map illustrated the local real estate establishment’s preference for existing homogeneous neighborhoods, the no-lined areas of the map were an index of the establishment’s ambitions to rationalize land use throughout the city, consolidating urban functions and eliminating heterogeneity—a quality that the Mission had in abundance. The HOLC report demonstrates that the federal government was endorsing a centralization of planning authority in San Francisco. The local institutions that had helped the neighborhood to counterbalance the power of downtown interests, like the Mission Bank, were themselves becoming centralized and less responsive to local needs. The WPA, PWA, and USHA had begun to promote a more egalitarian urban life, while at the same time the home finance agencies began to render many familiar features of urban life invisible. In the plans and the visual economies associated with the FHLBB, HOLC, and FHA, the new, homogeneous, and suburban areas of the city were to be reserved for living, while the older and mixed-use areas were to be reserved for the production and circulation of goods. A 1948 city planning report would describe significant portions of the Mission as “non-living areas.”125 In 1937, the HOLC charted this future by no-lining most of the neighborhood, rendering it a blank canvas for modernization projects. Beginning in the early 1930s, the new Latino population had been rendered invisible within the boundaries of the Mission District; by V-J Day, most residents and institutions of the Mission would begin to be rendered invisible in the plans of government agencies. These plans were driven by downtown business interests, who had now captured urban planning power for all of San Francisco.

To Stay or to Go? In response to this emerging circumstance, the local business interests continued to boost the neighborhood, but they also began to map their departure. Continuing the neighborhood’s long-standing tradition of me-

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morializing Spanishness for the sake of retail promotion, in 1939 the merchants put on the Mission Trails Fiesta to advertise local businesses. The organizers placed bell towers and banners the length of the “Mission Miracle Mile” (Mission Street between Fourteenth and Twenty-Fourth Streets). An arch spanned the width of Mission Street; painted on the structure were red tiles, exposed adobe bricks, an image of the Mission Dolores, an image of a señorita, and the words “The Old Mission” (fig. 7.3). But while such promotional tableaux continued to appear on the streets of the Mission throughout this period, the pages of the Mission Merchants’ News revealed a tension between boosterism and an emerging economic reality. Beginning at least as early as 1940, the News began featuring a “House of the Month” with an elevation and a floor plan. The accompanying text typically described the kind of FHA financing that would be available for such a house, in all cases a newly constructed single-family detached house in an apparently suburban location. The designs were taken directly from the pattern books issued by the FHA and the Federal Home Building Service.126 The October 31, 1942, issue of the News included an article titled “Historian Boosts Local Products”; but just one column away, “A Gem of a House for Newlyweds” depicted a small “garden home” nestled into the trees, with no other structures in sight: a dream of low density. Just as the New Deal policies that revitalized the existing city were as-

Figure 7.3. Photographs of Mission Trails Celebration, 1939. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, AAB-4671 and AAB-9529.

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sociated with certain representational conventions, so the federal homefinance policies had their own architectural and iconographic vocabulary. The public works vision was represented in buildings that took after the factory and the machine; the FHA-sponsored vision was represented through neo-traditionalist rural buildings, like half-timbered cottages, Spanish haciendas, and garden homes as pictured in Mission Merchants’ News and even in bank advertisements in El Imparcial.127 The WPA iconography was populated by heroic, muscular laborers who were typically presented as objects of gaze and admiration; women and children were scarce in this style. These figures contrasted with the approachable, human-scale families from mortgage advertisements, FHA pamphlets, and the “Home” section of the San Francisco Chronicle, figures who were often shown from behind and in silhouette, as though you, the viewer, were a part of this family, approaching your new suburban setting. (See fig. 7.4.) As figure 7.1 illustrates, this vision was not reserved for Anglos; it was also offered to Latinos.

Conclusion In the planning documents that emerged at the onset of the Second World War, the city was almost uniformly represented as a dark maze; the labororiented vision of the vibrant and complex city, of heroic urbanism, was entirely absent. In 1941 the San Francisco Housing and Planning Association issued its First Steps to a Master Plan for San Francisco, presenting an antiurban vision that will be analyzed in depth in the following chapter. The institutions that might have advanced a countervailing vision began to fade. The PWA was dissolved the same year that First Steps was published; the WPA was dissolved two years later. In the period that followed, the intellectual and material resources of the state, at every level, were mobilized in the service of a vision that rigidly separated land uses and “rationalized” the city. There was a profound contradiction at the heart of the New Deal. On the one hand, many of the programs and policies promoted socioeconomic and racial equality; on the other, they promoted a technocratically defined vision of material progress. There is no transhistorical reason why those two aims should conflict with each other, but as they were pursued in the cities, they often did. As San Francisco prepared for a postwar world, middle-class Anglo Missionites were increasingly confronted with a choice—not just in the pages of the Mission Merchants’ News but also in their pocketbooks—between staying and boosting their old, dense neighborhood or leaving for a quiet and spacious idyll. Loans were harder to come by in the Mission and given only at higher interest rates over shorter

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Figure 7.4. The human-scale family approaching their suburban dream house; the troubles of the city recede behind the horizon. San Francisco Chronicle, January 29, 1941.

periods. More than half the neighborhood seemed to be slated for freeways and homogenous industrial development. In the early years of their operations, the federal home finance programs had made significant investments in the old neighborhoods. But by the 1940s these agencies, guided by prominent downtown interests, began to make the choice to stay in older urban neighborhoods increasingly irrational. In San Francisco, a deep financial crisis followed by a quiet stream of federal money accomplished what the campaign for the Burnham plan could not: radically transformative citywide planning with downtown business at the helm.

EIGHT

The Motoring Public and Neighborhood Erasure: The Culture and Practice of Postwar Transportation Planning On May 14, 1951, the San Francisco Call Bulletin ran a photograph of a goat perched atop a pile of boards; in the background lay the valley of the Mission District and the slopes culminating in Twin Peaks (fig. 8.1). The copy read: “This is one of 16 goats standing (usually just like this) in the way of the Bayshore Freeway . . . baa-a-a-ing bravely against progress.”1 The animal belonged to sixty-four-year-old widow Estelle West, who was battling the city to stay in her longtime home on Utah and Nineteenth Streets (fig. 8.2). “I can’t let them plow me under here,” she proclaimed. “Life is more important than progress.”2 She lost her fight and was paid $3,950 by the state of California when her house was razed later that year.3 A generalized fear of returning to a stagnant economy after the industrial mobilization of World War II helps to explain how a major metropolitan newspaper could represent the worries of a widow who was about to lose her house as quaint. But though the Call Bulletin portrayed West as a voice in the wilderness, she was certainly not alone. The year before, her neighbor on nearby Vermont Street, Edward Kelleher, had written the following to Mayor Elmer Robinson: I would like to know why the people on the Bayshore Freeway never had a chance to protest this highway from the Board of Supervisors’ Chambers or from any supervisor. . . . We have paid taxes to help build S.F. for 57 years, and this is a pretty raw deal to get after all the faithful service to our beloved city. We cannot buy other property in the Mission District for their, the States [sic] prices which we receive. We don’t want to leave this district. . . . The war is over for everybody but us. . . . People here are too old to have to go into debt again to meet today’s prices for new homes.4

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Figure 8.1. Photograph of Estelle West’s goats. San Francisco Call Bulletin, May 14, 1951. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, photo ID number AAC-0369.

Mr. Kelleher’s wife, Elizabeth, added her own comment to the bottom of the letter: “Mayor James Rolph was one of the old timers here, and I don’t think he would allow this to happen to us citizens here.”5 Mrs. Kelleher’s observation was probably correct. The Bayshore Freeway was a massive undertaking that was three years in construction, finally opening to traffic in 1958. During and immediately before the Rolph administration (1912–31), a public works project of this scale could not have been built over the objections of self-appointed neighborhood representatives like the MPA or the Mission Merchants’ Association. For the first three decades of the twentieth century, the municipal government of San Francisco had regarded the interests of Mission homeowners as the public interest, or at least as one among a number of legitimate public interests that could not be easily circumvented. Homeowners like those represented by the Fair Oaks Parking Association had once been able to call on city government to produce reports on property values and to help them to plan a beautification program for a single block. Now homeowners were shut out of the process by which their houses would be condemned.6 The neighborhood’s loss of political power found expression in many arenas. While the Mission had once dominated the school board, now lo-

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Figure 8.2. Estelle West with her goats. San Francisco Call Bulletin, April 28, 1951. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, photo ID number AAC-0348.

cal chapters of the PTA were complaining that the city was cutting too much funding from schools.7 In the 1920s, Mission businesses had regularly requested and received zoning variances; now such requests were much less common and were typically denied.8 The improvement clubs and merchants’ associations could once count on getting desired infrastructure projects through city government without incident; now the neighborhood

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could only get projects that improved vehicular circulation, and sometimes found even those difficult to secure. As many skilled white workers moved to the suburbs, so too did many of the unions that represented them. A number of those unions had kept offices in the Labor Temple, and their departure translated to a loss of revenue for the SFLC; by the 1950s the council found itself taking out a series of loans for basic maintenance to the temple. Citing reduced circulation and plummeting ad revenue, the SFLC announced that it would cease publication of the Labor Clarion in 1948.9 In 1959, the Building Trades Temple burned. Unable to rebuild, the BTC moved to existing office space on Market Street. Labor did not vanish—many locals retained their headquarters in the Mission, and the neighborhood remained the city’s primary residential area and cultural locus for unionized workers. But labor was no longer the force that it had been. In 1952 the Gompers School—originally established to train journeymen—was converted to a junior high school, a decision that was motivated in part out of citywide teacher resentment over the fact that the faculty was composed largely of unionists without advanced degrees.10 The Mission’s struggles also found expression in the built environment. Outside of the no-lined area of the northeastern Mission—where industrial warehouses were being constructed—the urban fabric deteriorated but otherwise remained largely unchanged. A police station, firehouse, and Catholic school were constructed during the 1950s, but little else was.11 The municipal government of San Francisco described the old Mission police station, a piece of Spanish colonial design, as “outmoded.”12 The new police station was executed in a modernist architectural language that celebrated not only functionality and economy but also an emerging, nebulous global culture. The firehouse and the Catholic school were likewise rendered in a modernist idiom that erased local identity. These projects marked the end of the neighborhood’s long-standing tradition of commemorating its imagined heritage in built form.13 The Mission was changing, and neighborhood residents and leaders found that there was only so much they could do about it. In part 3 of Making the Mission, I demonstrate that the centralization of planning power that began under the New Deal reached its zenith in the decades immediately following World War II. To tell the story of planning in the Mission during the immediate postwar period is to tell the story of what entities outside the neighborhood were planning for the Mission, an observation that is truer for this period than for any other in the neighborhood’s history. These planning campaigns had behind them the force

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of many of the city’s most powerful corporations, but they were also responding to larger structural changes. At the national level was emerging a set of institutional and financial arrangements, as well as a broad-based cultural context, that provided material and intellectual support to these campaigns. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce lobbied for federal funding for slum clearance and new highways, issuing educational pamphlets and films to cultivate local support for their efforts. Estelle West’s house was surely an example of what the national chamber referred to as “quaint obsolescence” in its 1956 informational film “The Dynamic American City.”14 To illustrate how American cities were moving toward the future, the film actually featured shots of the Bayshore Freeway, specifically the stretch of road that went directly over West’s property.15 This march toward progress was accomplished with an enormous influx of federal money for urban renewal and transportation planning. The money was controlled by a new coalition between municipal agencies and corporations, including their lobbying bodies—all entities that neighborhood groups regarded as “downtown.” It was this coalition that elaborated a plan for the future of San Francisco, a plan that would level so-called slums and crisscross the city with a network of freeways that was designed primarily to facilitate circulation into and out of the financial district. The neighborhood was slated for three major freeway projects, one of which the Mission Merchants’ Association favored, one it opposed, and one it took no position on. Only this last project was built. The present chapter will tell the story of why the other two were not, demonstrating that the outcomes had little to do with the movement known as the freeway revolt, as has sometimes been suggested, and more to do with downtown groups’ desire to strengthen the city’s position as a regional commercial center, and with transportation planners’ calculations about property tax revenue. I then describe the early stages of a transportation initiative that would arguably be more radically transformative for the Mission than the freeways: Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART). While the freeway revolt would spark a public debate, the BART system would be planned almost completely behind closed doors. Though Mission-based groups and residents often found themselves at odds with the programs of transportation planners, they had little success influencing the process or the outcomes. But that is not to say that planning energies were moribund. Indeed, the neighborhood planning traditions that dated back to the Progressive Era survived in remarkably similar form. The Mission Merchants’ Association continued to support the commercial geography of the neighborhood and to challenge plans that its leaders saw as detrimental to that goal. In

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the years immediately following the war, Mission groups struggled—but certainly never surrendered. To appreciate exactly what neighborhood capitalism was up against, it is important to first understand the ways in which a new planning regime was consolidating around downtown corporate interests.

The Balance Sheet and Urban Space: The Institutional and Cultural Logics of the Postwar Planning Regime In the immediate postwar period, a coalition of corporations, academic urban planners, and governmental agencies would unify around the aim of modernizing and rationalizing the built environment of San Francisco. This coalition was so effective that it qualifies as what historians sometimes call a “regime”: “an informal yet relatively stable group with access to institutional resources that enable it to have a sustained role in making governing decisions.”16 To understand the institutional lineage of San Francisco’s postwar planning regime, it is necessary to briefly return to the Progressive Era. In 1910 reformers created the San Francisco Housing Association, largely for the purpose of lobbying for anti-tenement laws designed to protect the public against unsound structures that were hastily built after the disaster of 1906.17 The organization was effective in lobbying for building codes, but its activities did not extend beyond tenement-house reform. That would begin to change in the 1930s. With a worsening housing crisis and New Deal funds to address it, the association seized an opportunity to expand its scope. The organization was instrumental in creating the San Francisco Housing Authority (SFHA) in 1938, but it retained its own identity. In the early 1940s, the association forged institutional connections with the academy when it was joined by members of a group calling itself Telesis, many of whom taught architecture and landscape architecture at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design.18 Reflecting its new composition and agenda, the San Francisco Housing Association became the San Francisco Planning and Housing Association (SFPHA). The influence of the academic planners was clearly visible in the association’s specific land use recommendations, all of which tracked closely with the concept of the “Functional City,” as articulated by the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). Central to the Functional City was the idea that physical zones—for transportation, work, and dwelling—should be rigidly separated from one another.19 Also central was the idea that any land use decision needed to conform to an overarching master plan.20 But

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while CIAM claimed allegiance to no political or economic order during this period (in part as a strategy for making the Functional City adaptable to any sociopolitical circumstance), the SFPHA was dominated by an explicitly capitalist logic, in particular a logic that privileged the interests of industrial capital and high finance. During the Progressive Era, a neighborhood capitalism had flourished in San Francisco. Local banks, real estate interests, and commercial interests formed coalitions with labor and were able to influence the municipal government to nurture an economy in which neighborhood came first. As the MPA put it, the central purpose was “to unite, and keep united, the residents and taxpayers of the Mission District for their material, social, and moral advancement.”21 The interests of local capital would be served, but those interests were hitched to the health of the neighborhood. By contrast, the overarching concern of the SFPHA was that land in the City of San Francisco be recognized strictly as a commodity—and be managed accordingly. This orientation helps to explain why, through the 1940s and 1950s, the association attracted the attention of many prominent members of the Chamber of Commerce, including the Blyth-Zellerbach Committee (B-Z), a group drawing its name from an investment banking firm (Blyth) and a paper manufacturer (Zellerbach) and representing downtown business interests.22 With funding from B-Z, the association reconfigured itself once again in 1959, dropping “Housing” altogether to become the San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal Association (SPUR), an entity that reflexively supported development that was favorable to industrial and finance capital.23 During the Progressive Era, many prominent members of the MPA were also prominent members of the Chamber of Commerce and other downtown-affiliated interest groups. In the immediate postwar period, the downtown planning regime had no considerable representation from the Mission. Many members of this new coalition, like the Crocker Bank, had supported comprehensive city planning since the days when Daniel Burnham had reimagined San Francisco. Indeed, the new regime understood their activities as a reclamation and vindication of the Burnham plan. According to SPUR and the Department of City Planning, Burnham’s scheme had been defeated by the so-called machine politicians of the Schmitz administration, who “had failed to grasp the real opportunity before the city.”24 In fact, the Schmitz administration had been the plan’s best hope.25 The Burnham plan had actually been defeated by the Chronicle, by many downtown corporate interests, and by a motley collection of local homeowner

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and business groups, not least among them the MPA.26 But the revisionist history was much more useful, allowing the postwar planning regime to situate its own agenda within a long-standing domestic tradition, one in which the enlightened citizens of San Francisco had always presented a unified front. Whatever the historical realities, by the early 1940s, the planning regime did indeed present a unified front, with the promise of federal funding as a key motivating factor. In 1942, the SFPHA emphasized the fact that the government was already contemplating floating “tremendous” loans to help cities transition “from war production to peace production.” But the government had made clear that such loans would only be available to cities that had an active planning commission and a master plan—an official document laying out a long-term agenda for the development of the city, a plan that coordinated transportation, housing, recreation, service provision, and commercial and industrial development.27 In the early 1940s, the city’s Planning Commission was mostly reactive, responding to requests for zoning variances but not advancing its own campaigns. The SFPHA was the driving force behind the elevation of the City Planning Commission to the status of a municipal department in 1947, and it furnished much of the early leadership of that department. According to the Crown Zellerbach Corporation, it was the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce that actually wrote California’s Community Redevelopment Act.28 Passed in 1945, the act enabled municipalities to create redevelopment agencies that were empowered to use eminent domain in the service of urban renewal; the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) was created immediately upon passage of the law.29 The California act was passed four years before the federal Housing Act of 1949, which gave the same powers to municipalities across the country and strengthened the SFRA. The powers of these agencies were to be guided by the new corporate planning regime. The SFPHA’s first publication, a 1942 pamphlet titled “Now Is the Time to Plan: First Steps to a Master Plan for San Francisco,” laid out the agenda. The pamphlet featured a series of panels showing the city “as it is”—inefficient, obsolete, and dangerous—contrasted with panels showing the city “as it could be”—suburban. (See fig. 8.3.) The “as it is” panels were rendered in negative, lending the scenes an oppressive, claustrophobic quality; meanwhile, the “as it could be” panels were rendered in positive, communicating an airy lightness. In all of the arenas where San Francisco’s postwar planning regime promoted its goals, its principal method for appealing to suburbanites, and would-be suburbanites, was to

Figure 8.3. “Your Services” panels. SFPHA, “Now Is the Time to Plan: First Steps to a Master Plan for San Francisco,” 1941.

Figure 8.4. “You Play” panels, contrasting the scene “as it is,” with children playing in the gutter, to a scene as “it could be”: a modernist suburbia. SFPHA, “Now Is the Time to Plan,” 1941.

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project an image of modern, low-density communities that were safe for children and that were well served by highways. (See fig. 8.4.) One measure of the SFPHA’s influence was the close resemblance between its own publications and those of municipal agencies. The Department of City Planning, for example, employed the same visual language in representing the city: dark urban present; bright suburban future. More significant was the fact that all of the priorities and strategies laid out in “Now Is the Time” were intact in the official “Master Plan for San Francisco” when it was adopted in 1945. The primary aim of the Master Plan was the “improvement of the city as a place for commerce and industry by making it more efficient, orderly, and satisfactory for the production, exchange and distribution of goods and services, with adequate space for each type of economic activity and improved facilities for the loading and movement of goods.”30 This concern was reflected in the iconography employed in Association publications. The first page of “Now Is the Time,” for example, was dominated by a drawing of a coin, with a dollar sign on its face, lying at the foot of a citizen (fig. 8.5). “We have before us a golden opportunity,” the text read. “Wouldn’t you increase the value of San Francisco and your section of it, by a comprehensive Master Plan?”31 In addition to coins, other illustrations in “Now Is the Time” prominently featured spreadsheets and checks to emphasize the importance of the accumulation and circulation of capital. Increasing the monetary “value of San Francisco” was the dominant concern of the city’s postwar planning campaign. Neighborhood, meanwhile, featured only as “your section” of San Francisco, a component of a larger and more important whole. These ways of thinking about neighborhoods were not merely local; they characterized a national planning culture that prevailed for decades after World War II. In 1957, the Eisenhower administration issued a pamphlet that sketched the institutional configurations through which public works should be planned and executed across the country. The pamphlet described a hierarchy of “comprehensive planning units” that would decide what projects were needed for their respective jurisdictions.32 The different levels of authority were federal agencies, states, counties, municipalities, and finally service districts (school, water, sanitation, etc.).33 Absent from the list of comprehensive planning units was the organizational scale that had been so determinative of urban form and urban life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the neighborhood. In terms of legitimate scales of planning authority, there was no longer any such thing as

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Figure 8.5. The opening page of “Now Is the Time to Plan.” SFPHA, 1941.

a neighborhood. Any agency that insisted otherwise would be out of sync with federal funding standards. This hierarchy was reflected in the SFPHA’s bird’s-eye views of San Francisco and the region. As figure 8.6 shows, the association presented San Francisco as a space for the production and circulation of goods. HOLC no-lining had been informed by many of the same people who now guided the SFPHA, and the same mind-set was on display here. Neighborhoods were represented simply as blank space, space that was there strictly to be traversed by major state-led modernization projects that were designed, quite simply, to make urban space profitable. Of course the MPA had also thought of the neighborhood unit in busi-

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ness terms, but in Rolph and Sullivan’s conception the Mission was its own independent concern, the profits of which were to redound to the neighborhood itself. The SFPHA, on the other hand, presented neighborhoods not as independent concerns but almost as franchises, or even as product lines, products that should be designed so as to maximize returns to the municipality. Sometimes this hierarchy was represented with biological metaphors, as in this 1947 Planning Commission pamphlet: Whether you think of the new San Francisco as a group of neighborhoods within a framework of major traffic and transit streets or as a system of major

Figure 8.6. San Francisco represented as a site of production and as a transportation problem. Existing neighborhoods are represented as blank space. SFPHA, “Now Is the Time to Plan,” 1941.

190 / Chapter Eight streets bounding and linking together various neighborhoods, all the parts of the city relate to one another as neatly as the parts of an efficient mechanism or living organism. Each boulevard, each neighborhood has been conceived as part of a Master Plan.34

In this common formulation, a neighborhood was a cog in a machine or an organ in a living body, and its most important function was to keep traffic moving. But even when the new planning vision was represented as a campaign to heal a sick body, the balance sheet was never far from mind, a fact that comes into focus when one considers how the SFPHA determined whether an area was “blighted.” Blight is itself a biological metaphor, a term that describes a spreading plant pathology, presumed to be airborne but of unknown origin. In urban planning discourse, this designation had explicitly economic implications. The blighted neighborhoods were those “which cost the city more in services (streets, schools, sewers, light, etc.) than they bring in through taxes. Those ‘bankrupt’ sections are carried and subsidized by the business and healthy residential sections. Can this go on forever?” the SFPHA challenged.35 The association refined this argument in its 1947 publication “Blight and Taxes,” which subjected two neighborhoods to a “balance sheet” analysis.36 The pamphlet compared the Marina District, a white and Italian neighborhood that the HOLC had given a B rating, with the “GearyFillmore,” a largely African American neighborhood that the HOLC had shaded red, and in which only one private mortgage institution was lending in the 1930s.37 The authors calculated how much revenue each neighborhood generated for the city through real estate taxes, and how much each neighborhood cost the city through services. The Marina, in this analysis, had generated $468,924 more than it consumed in services, while the Geary-Fillmore was “$373,295 short of paying its own way in 1946.”38 In addition to costing the city in services, the SFPHA argued that the blighted neighborhoods were also costing the city in tax base because affluent residents were leaving these districts for newer suburbs. From the planning perspective, the conclusion was clear: “Areas in the city which lose to the suburbs decay and go to seed—these are the blighted areas which must be replanned and rebuilt and bring [sic] the suburbs back to the city.”39 Faced with comparable problems at the time, Chicago’s city council pushed the local planning regime to consider whether rehabilitation might be a more cost-effective approach to blight. In response, the Chicago Housing Authority “stacked the cost analysis to return the desired result,” which

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was to demonstrate that clearance was the only solution.40 But the prospect of rehabilitation received at least some kind of hearing; the same does not appear to be true in immediate postwar San Francisco. The question of whether any particular area of the city made more than it cost was closely bound with the official promotion of efficient transportation systems. As Mayor George Christopher’s office maintained well into the 1960s, the problem of inefficient transportation threatened the “utter deterioration of the even flow of goods and people, thus resulting in economic disaster” for the city as a whole.41 The mayor’s position was indistinguishable from that of the Downtown Association, which consistently warned that for San Francisco to ignore the problem would mean “the loss of the bulwark of its tax base, intolerable traffic blight and economic strangulation.”42 Concern over the efficient transportation provision made even the “profitable” neighborhoods like the Marina subject to potential clearance: though the Marina did generate revenue, it also cluttered the path between downtown and the Golden Gate Bridge with a tangle of narrow gridded streets. While neighborhoods were completely recast in this new planning environment, so were considerations about the welfare of the less fortunate. The San Francisco Housing Association had framed its campaigns in terms of social melioration—a desire to defend the poor from exploitation in tenement houses—but such considerations became background, or were entirely absent, in the reports of the SFPHA. In the newer vision, social considerations were confined to what urbanists in the 1980s would refer to as “quality of life” questions: recreation accommodation, hassle-free transportation experiences, proximity to retail, and other matters relating to the convenience and comfort of middle-class consumers. One measure of the ascendancy of this new vision was the fact that even the Housing Authority felt compelled to frame its mission in terms of the balance sheet and the retention of higher-income white residents.43 At its inception in the 1910s, the housing movement in San Francisco framed its mission in terms of “social welfare,” presenting itself as a line of defense against the “rampant greed” of developers.44 By 1941, the SFHA described its core purpose in fiscalized terms, as the “reclamation of unprofitable shabby districts which now act as blockades for better uses . . . those areas now obsolete and which produce less than they consume.”45 In its 1957 annual report the SFHA insisted that it had always acted in “the public interest.”46 While the authority did present some social concerns (health standards, crime rates, and delinquency) as dimensions of the public interest, it privileged the argument that SFHA “projects do make a greater

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return to the City in the form of payments in lieu of taxes than the original properties that stood on those sites.”47 Such payments were often cited by the SFHA as a means of demonstrating the authority’s ability to produce revenue, which was the final justification for its continued existence. The one social consideration that seemed to apply with equal force from the housing movement’s inception in the Progressive Era, through its corporatization in the New Deal and postwar period, was the concern for the welfare of children. The SFPHA’s “Now Is the Time” pamphlet contained some typical visual rhetoric. It featured panels illustrating recreational provision—“as it is,” with a toddler crawling on the sidewalk and another child floating a toy boat in the gutter, and how “it could be,” depicting a well-equipped, fenced playground. Concern for the environment of the poor had waned, but since suburbanization was motivated in no small part by middle-class concerns about the environment in which they were raising their sons and daughters, child welfare continued to occupy a prominent place in planners’ discourse. Children not only provided a compelling rationale for replanning the city; they were also an avenue through which parents might be educated about the wisdom of doing so. And, as future voters, children themselves were an important audience. With all of this in mind, the SFPHA promulgated its ideas about the need for a revenue-generating city not only to the SFHA, the Board of Supervisors, the mayor, and in media outlets, but also in the public schools. In 1943, the association convinced the San Francisco Unified School District to include urban planning as a subject in its social studies curriculum, and in the spring of 1946, a pilot program was rolled out.48 In the new planning curriculum, kindergartners learned mostly about traffic signals and recreation. First graders “learned that a home section should have playgrounds and their district had none.”49 But by the third grade, the curriculum “laid particular emphasis on the city’s transport,” including “the plans for a freeway system.”50 (See color plate 5.) Sixth-graders were sent on field trips where “they saw slums and wrote critical essays on dirt, overcrowding, rats, lack of sun, lack of heat and toilet facilities.”51 After the pilot program proved popular among students and teachers, the school district produced a series of social studies texts that used San Francisco as a case study to introduce elementary school students to urban planning.52 The texts included exercises asking students to be “Junior Planners,” using maps and models to design ideal cities—exercises that invariably attempted to convince children of the wisdom of a marketoriented version of CIAM principles of city planning.53 Though the language of the texts was simplified for a younger audience,

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the substance was identical to that of publications like “Now Is the Time.” Students were told of the importance of having a master plan, of the need for zoning and efficient transportation systems, and of the problems of density and obsolescence: Some parts of our city are growing old. They were built long ago. Many of the houses are too close together. Some rooms get no sunlight and are dark. There is no space in neighborhoods for playgrounds. The children play in the streets and alleys. Some day most of the buildings in these old neighborhoods will be torn down. New neighborhoods will be built.54

The image illustrating this passage shows two small children standing on a dark street, near dark row houses, on narrow lots. The children point out to the brightness of the modernist future that approaches them, as construction workers clear away the aging structures board by board, and lot by lot (color plate 6). The visual economy (and perhaps even the hand) is again identical to that seen in “Now Is the Time to Plan” (figs. 8.3 and 8.4). When the Bay Area Rapid Transit Commission (BARTC) launched its public relations campaign in the 1950s, it also targeted schools. A BARTC consultant, Herbert Cerwin, reasoned, “The interest of these young people is contagious. They bring their lessons and their discussions home to their families.” Nestor Barrett, chair of BARTC’s Public Relations Committee, agreed with the strategy, observing that “many of these young people that are being educated today will be voting on these bonds tomorrow.”55 Proponents of the Burnham plan had realized this in the 1910s but had failed to convince the schools to adopt a planning curriculum.56 Here was another arena in which the postwar regime realized a dream of San Francisco’s Progressive Era planners.

The Motoring Public and Neighborhood Erasure One of the new planning regime’s primary aims was to rationalize the city’s transportation system with a network of freeways. The first amendment to San Francisco’s Master Plan was the 1951 Trafficways Plan; while the citywide Land Use Plan would be not be adopted for another two years, in 1953.57 While one might assume that the Trafficways Plan would conform to the citywide Land Use Plan, in fact the opposite was true. Freeways were the priority, and the legal and institutional context of the immediate postwar period put San Francisco transportation planners in an excellent position to see their projects realized. When it came to highway legisla-

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tion, California was ahead of the national curve, passing the Collier-Burns Highway Act in 1947.58 The act mandated that municipalities create a system of primary roads, and it expanded a statewide gasoline tax to finance them.59 In 1952, California passed legislation creating the Highway Rightof-Way Acquisition Fund, which simplified the process of expropriating land for freeways.60 The National Highway Acts of 1954 and 1956 would later ensure that these activities were on firmer legal ground and were better funded.61 But San Francisco did not wait around. Immediately on the heels of California’s 1947 Highway Act, the Planning Commission hired national consultants De Leuw Cather and Ladislas Segoe to produce a transportation plan for the city. The report introduced a number of new metrics to determine where routes should go. Prominent among the new measures was the origin-destination study that tracked where driving trips began and where they ended, then charted a straight line between the two points. When trips were aggregated and mapped, the resulting pattern of “desire lines” suggested where a path was most needed, and what the most direct and therefore ideal route would be.62 Whose desire did this instrument measure? Trips were charted for both private automobiles and trucks, meaning that it was not only workers and other private drivers but also shippers and other businesses moving goods whose desire was being quantified. Many of those private drivers were coming from the surrounding suburbs, which had three times as many registered vehicles as San Francisco.63 Viewed in aggregate, all of the desire line mappings suggested that in order to facilitate circulation into and out of downtown, radical transformation was needed in the Mission. (See fig.  8.7.) The report concluded by recommending two paths that closely conformed to the WPA’s 1937 Traffic Survey and which were also visible in the Burnham plan.64 Two north–south routes, the Bayshore Freeway and the Mission Freeway, were to traverse the Mission, at some points only ten blocks apart from each other. (See fig. 8.8.) The report also endorsed the idea of a “southern crossing” to span the bay from Army Street to one of the suburbs south of Oakland. The Bayshore Freeway was among the first completed in San Francisco, opening to traffic in 1958, while the Embarcadero Freeway opened in 1959. Resistance to the Bayshore came only from a handful of older residents, like Estelle West and the Kellehers, who had little political capital. The powerful unions, especially the SFLC and the BTC, had both supported the freeway plan in general because it meant construction jobs. The Mission Merchants’ Association took no position on the Bayshore Freeway,

Figure 8.7. Major desire lines, 1947; the heavier the traffic, the thicker the line. Consulting engineers De Leuw Cather and Company with consulting city planners Ladislas Segoe and Associates, “Report to the City Planning Commission on a Transportation Plan for San Francisco,” 1948.

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Figure 8.8. A 1948 highway plan for San Francisco. De Leuw Cather and Company with Ladislas Segoe and Associates, “Report to the City Planning Commission,” 1948.

a fact that highlights a crucial difference between the Merchants and the MPA. While the MPA had been intimately involved with all large projects in the Mission (and many large projects throughout San Francisco as a whole), the Merchants only sporadically voiced an opinion on land use matters in the immediate postwar period—unless the plans had a direct physical impact on the retail stretch of Mission Street or affected parking in the surrounding area.65 Because it was part of the first campaign of freeway building in the city, the Bayshore was a fait accompli well before the citizens of San Francisco would mount a “freeway revolt.” By contrast, a proposal to connect the Mission to either Alameda or Hayward in the East Bay—a project known as the Southern Crossing—was controversial from the beginning. The debate surrounding the project illustrates the ways in which private downtown interests were able to impose their plans, not only upon surrounding neighborhoods and suburbs but also upon municipal government. The idea was originally floated a year before the Planning Commission’s 1948 Highway Plan. The Bay Bridge—also known as the James “Sunny Jim” Rolph Jr. Bridge—had opened in 1936,

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connecting an area just north of downtown Oakland to the Rincon Hill area just south of downtown San Francisco (an area that been home to a small colonia). By the end of World War II, the bridge was beyond capacity, and downtown San Francisco was choked with traffic. Any solution to this problem would clearly require the cooperation of East Bay cities, which had their own traffic problems, and their own interests to advance. A study of regional traffic was needed, and both Oakland and San Francisco hoped to secure the services of a disinterested third party who would happen to see things their way. A committee of Bay Area cities agreed to bring in the California Department of Public Works. But fearing that the department was likely to produce a solution favorable to Oakland, San Francisco prevailed upon one of its U.S. congressional representatives, Richard Welch, to bring in a Joint Army-Navy Board to conduct a separate study.66 Both reports were released in 1947. The state Department of Public Works recommended a parallel crossing—essentially a mirror of the Bay Bridge that would have been built immediately adjacent to the existing structure.67 The Joint Army-Navy Board recommended a southern crossing with bridgeheads on Alameda Island, south of downtown Oakland, and at Army Street in San Francisco, where the MPA had fought to create a harbor.68 The Southern Crossing received national publicity and even attracted the attention of Frank Lloyd Wright, who offered a design for the structure.69 For a time, it seemed that the project would be built. On the west side of the bay, San Francisco interests lined up behind the Army-Navy plan. The Mission Merchants’ Association had been lobbying for decades to have Army Street widened in order to “open up an avenue for people who desire to get to the Mission district for trading.”70 Their attempts, however, had been thwarted. For example, when in 1941 the Merchants and the Southern Civic Clubs lobbied the Board of Supervisors to widen Army, a faction on the board objected that the project might siphon funds from the widening of Third Street near the bay. The Third Street project had clear benefits for circulation into and out of downtown, while the Army Street project only promised to challenge downtown, so the Mission Merchants’ plan was defeated. But the Southern Crossing was even more desirable to Mission leaders, since it held out the prospect of drawing shoppers not just from San Francisco and San Mateo County to the south but also from the East Bay.71 The Merchants consistently endorsed the plan, and for once the Mission’s and downtown’s interests seemed to be aligned. The Chamber of Commerce originally supported the plan because it was anxious to bring

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rail connections into San Francisco. Though the existing Bay Bridge originally included light rail, it would never be able to accommodate mainline rail, which now terminated in Oakland. The chamber hoped to bring the transcontinental lines into southern San Francisco, at Army Street, up the coast of the bay, directly into downtown.72 The San Francisco Department of Public Works and city hall both believed that industry could only expand southward along the waterfront, so they were in sync with the chamber.73 The SFLC supported the plan because it would create industrial jobs in the city.74 The East Bay suburbs south of Oakland also supported the plan, because it would bring increased economic activity to their cities. However, the Oakland Chamber of Commerce opposed the Southern Crossing for all of the above reasons.75 Because the Oakland chamber’s primary concern was traffic congestion in its own downtown, and because it had no desire to allow more business to move to its suburbs or, worse still, to come within San Francisco’s economic orbit, the chamber favored the parallel crossing proposed by the state Department of Public Works.76 But the impasse between the chambers on both sides of the bay would soon be broken when it became clear that the major rail carriers had no intention of extending lines across a new Southern Crossing. Understanding that it would not get mainline rail, and the Southern Crossing would therefore only help the Mission, the San Francisco Chamber also came out against the plan and in favor of a parallel bridge, which would at least relieve some congestion downtown.77 Now the respective chambers had complementary interests: neither wanted economic activity moving to neighborhoods and cities to the south of them.78 Mayor Robinson, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and the SFLC—all eager to see more industry come to the south of the city—condemned the San Francisco chamber, charging that it was serving “special interests”; the mayor even threatened to move the chamber’s municipal subsidies to the SFLC and the BTC, “organizations which interest themselves in the public welfare.”79 A group representing both chambers, in turn, charged that the campaign for a southern crossing was a “‘self-interested’ one by people who wanted to see their property values in the southern part of San Francisco and down the peninsula increased. . . . The general interest in the relief of congestion on the existing bridge must take precedence over any ‘promotional’ projects.”80 The use of the word “promotional” was calculated to cast as parochial the many neighborhood promotion and improvement clubs, like the Southern Improvement Association (an old ally of the Mission Promotion Association) that lobbied for the Southern Crossing.

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In spite of the protests of the mayor and the Board of Supervisors, the chambers’ opposition was enough to kill the Southern Crossing plan at the end of the 1940s.81 The U.S. Navy scuttled the parallel bridge plan because enemy bombers could conceivably destroy two bridges at once, and in the end, no new bridge was built.82 Even so, the fact that the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce could suggest that the groups lobbying for a southern crossing were “self-interested” illustrates the extent to which its own interests had come to dominate the planning of the city. The chamber was denouncing not only the Mission Merchants’ Association and the unions but also legally elected or appointed representatives of the public— including the mayor, the Department of Public Works, and the Board of Supervisors. These, for the chamber, were all “special interests.” The business group’s tactics were not dissimilar from those that the MPA had employed to great effect decades earlier in the debates over the Burnham plan, Islais Creek, and other major planning initiatives. The crucial difference was that the MPA defined the public at the scale of the neighborhood and effectively cast “downtown” as a special interest. Now the San Francisco Chamber reversed this relationship, defining the public at the scale of the city, but with downtown at the helm, and defining as special interests not only the neighborhood groups but also the smaller cities in San Mateo and Alameda counties, and even the municipal government itself. Many governmental agencies during the New Deal had invoked the notion of economic equality as a criterion for determining the public interest. In the immediate postwar period, that language was absent, having been replaced with an emphasis on efficient circulation. A string of correspondence in 1949 between the City Planning Commission and the Southern Pacific (SP) neatly illustrates the new conception of the public interest. Paul Opperman, of the commission, wrote to its members to argue that the city needed to contact the SP about acquiring a right of way that was needed for the Mission Freeway. (See fig. 8.9.) He announced that the freeway was vital to the “public interest” of “facilitating communication between the Central Business District and the residential sections it serves.”83 A few days later, M. Johnson of the SP wrote to the commission that “we do not now have in contemplation the abandonment of any portion of this branch line for the reason that it is necessary in connection with our operations . . . to be used by the shipping public.”84 Both sides of this argument were making a claim to the public interest: the city on behalf of a driving public, and the SP on behalf of the shipping public. That a vital public interest was being served by ensuring that both drivers and goods should be circulating

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Figure 8.9. Proposed Mission Freeway. De Leuw Cather and Company with Ladislas Segoe and Associates, “Report to the City Planning Commission,” 1948.

more freely to and from the Central Business District was never in dispute. This would begin to change—not only in the Mission, but around the city. The Bayshore Freeway met with very little opposition, but when the first section of the Embarcadero Freeway went up in 1955, it raised the ire of ordinary citizens and the editorial boards of all the major newspapers.85 Though concern over property values underlay much of the opposition, the discourse focused on aesthetics: the double-decked freeway blocked views of the historic Ferry Building and of the bay. A representative of the Northern California Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) crystallized the objections at a hearing on freeways in 1961: “A line on a map, a circle where two of these lines cross, eventually become landeating, view-shocking tangles of steel and concrete structures: ‘Origin and destination studies,’ ‘lines of desire,’ become almost permanent dominating features of the city skyline. Views change, neighborhoods change, the whole character of the city changes.”86 The AIA Chapter acknowledged that freeways were needed to address the traffic problem; the chapter objected not to freeway planning but to the dominance of traffic engineers in that planning and to the appearance of the structures that resulted. This posi-

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tion logically suggested that the chapter should “offer the good services of our profession in the public interest to participate fully in further study of San Francisco’s future.”87 In response to the uproar over the Embarcadero Freeway, the SFPHA, Downtown Association, and the mayor all conceded that more care should be taken to integrate the structures into existing urban fabric.88 However, all of those entities also continued to insist that freeways were necessary if San Francisco wished to avoid “the loss of the bulwark of its tax base, intolerable traffic blight and economic strangulation.”89 San Francisco’s postwar planning regime presented freeways as vital to the economic prosperity of the entire city, but when ordinary homeowners and local businesses weighed the benefits, they came to very different conclusions. A freeway might help regional circulation, but what would the structure mean for circulation within their own neighborhood? Would it ease congestion, or just create a new barrier? How much noise and pollution would residents have to endure? How would “a steel and concrete monster” affect the property values of nearby lots? For whose benefit were the freeways actually intended: neighborhood residents or trucks and suburban commuters?90 These concerns prompted citizens to create “neighborhood defense groups,” like the Property Owners’ Association of San Francisco (organized in the Sunset District) and the Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council.91 While planners had been asking quality-of-life questions about the entire city—and proposing radically suburbanizing revisions to the city based on their conclusions—the so-called freeway revolt marked a moment in which neighborhoods began to reassert their right to consider these questions for themselves.92 As far as the defense groups were concerned, the city’s reliance on the balance sheet showed a callous disregard for the real people who lived in the path of progress. The fact that the city tended to explain the consequences of freeways with technocratic detachment did not help them to deflect these charges. For example, in 1960 Mayor George Christopher’s office issued a report on freeway planning that explained the process with illustrated panels that had a cartoonish style: the allocation of money from the state was represented as a pile of coins cutting a freeway across a street grid; the condemnation of a neighborhood was represented as a check being carried toward empty houses.93 The illustrations had a frankness about them that seemed increasingly ominous to ordinary citizens: it appeared that money itself was leveling their neighborhoods. In many cities across the United States, highway plans exhibited local racial biases, proposing routes through minority neighborhoods as part of a larger renewal strategy.94 Citizen groups who became aware of the pattern

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in Washington, D.C., for example, began distributing flyers demanding “no more white highways through black bedrooms.”95 The freeway routes planned in San Francisco exhibited no obvious racial bias. Indeed, in the two neighborhoods that the SFPHA analyzed in its “Blight and Taxes” pamphlet, it was the affluent and white Marina neighborhood that was slated for a freeway, while the African American Geary-Fillmore was not. Unlike the situation in Washington, D.C., resistance to freeways in San Francisco came almost exclusively from relatively affluent Anglos.96 Many of San Francisco’s urban renewal plans would exhibit explicit racial biases, but this does not seem to have been the case with the various roadway plans. The clear biases reflected in the freeway plans were in favor of circulation over aesthetics, downtown over neighborhoods. A disregard for neighborhoods in general, and the Mission District in particular, was also apparent in the way that San Francisco’s Land Use Plan (part of the Master Plan) divided the city into distinct “areas” or “communities.” The text explained that the Planning Department had decided on “community” boundaries based on “traditionally accepted topographic or naturally formed limits or by the location of existing or proposed trafficways or open spaces.”97 Yet one community boundary was drawn the length of Mission Street, along the path of the proposed Mission Freeway, a decision that flew in the face of “traditionally accepted” mappings: for at least half a century, San Franciscans had thought of the Mission retail corridor not as a limit but as the very heart of the neighborhood.98 This mapping essentially split the neighborhood along its spine. During the ascendancy of the MPA, the Mission District had operated as a coherent political unit. The Master Plan raised the possibility that it might not even remain a coherent physical unit for long.99 While bitter battles ensued over the planned freeways in the western and northern areas of the city, there turned out to be little to fight about when it came to the Mission Freeway. On February 2, 1958, the Mission Merchants’ Association wrote the City Planning Commission on the subject. The Merchants began by reminding the commission of their own economic muscle, and then—mobilizing the rhetoric of the freeway revolt— demanded that the road be stopped: Our organization, the largest and oldest district merchants’ association in the country, is this year celebrating its 50th Anniversary. We have a huge financial investment and expend large sums each year for advertising and promoting the Mission Miracle Mile, as well as contributing very substantial [sic] in taxes. We are influential, strongly supported, and closely knit orga-

The Motoring Public and Neighborhood Erasure / 203 nization composed of merchants, professional people, and property owners. We do not propose to sit idly by while our businesses are decimated by a steel and concrete “monster,” which, as we understand it, would cut the depth of many of our stores to as little as 40 feet, and in fact, mean the demise of an important business area, as has been the case in all other business areas where freeways have gone through.100

Surprisingly, Director Opperman responded five days later that the Mission Freeway had been off the city’s plans for years.101 Opperman offered no explanation as to why the freeway had been eliminated, but a 1960 Planning Department study, called “Trafficways in San Francisco: A Reappraisal,” suggests that the planners had already considered the economic importance of the Mission corridor. The report noted that while the Mission Freeway would be the single most effective route for relieving traffic, it would also have resulted in a “reduction of the assessment roll [which] would be about two thirds as great [as any other proposed freeway route] as it would involve the dislocation of nearly twice the number of business properties.”102 So while the immediate postwar planning regime had disassembled the neighborhood as a discrete political entity or comprehensive planning unit, the Mission retail corridor still had one claim on the public interest: it was an asset to the municipality’s balance sheet. By the mid-1950s, the wisdom of freeways was everywhere being challenged. Beginning in the early 1940s, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors regularly discussed ways in which physical aspects of city should be transformed in order to serve the “interests of the motoring public.”103 When the freeway revolt gained momentum after 1956, the phrase “motoring public” disappeared entirely from the supervisors’ vocabulary. Citing overwhelming community opposition, the board would become the first municipal entity to break with the established Trafficways Plan in 1959, passing a resolution “Declaring Opposition to the Construction of All Freeways Contained in the Master Plan”—excepting, of course, those that had already been built.104 Because no freeway could be built without road closures, and because no road could be closed in San Francisco without the approval of the supervisors, the board’s opposition effectively stopped the freeway plan in its tracks. This was done over the objections of the mayor, SPUR, the Downtown Association, the Chamber of Commerce, and the state of California, which did not want to forfeit federal monies allocated for the system.105 Figure 8.10 illustrates how the Trafficways Plan differed from the net-

204 / Chapter Eight Golden Gate Bridge

Ocean

Lombard

St

Embarcedero

St Broadway

ge

rid

yB

Ba

Panhandle

Richmond Fwy

Fwy Central

Park Presidio Blvd

Geary Expw

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San Francisco Bay

Sunset Blvd

Mi

ssi

on

y Aleman re Fw sho Bay

Junipero Serra Blvd

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pw y

Fw y

Southern Crossing

Ex

Fw y

Great Hwy

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Circumferential

Sunset Fwy

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Built Unbuilt Built and Demolished

Figure 8.10. Composite history of the San Francisco freeway system. Map by Blake Swanson.

work that was actually built. A section of the Central Freeway was constructed in the northeastern Mission, an area that the HOLC had no-lined in 1937. In the mental maps of many twenty-first-century San Franciscans, that stretch of the Central Freeway marks the border between the Mission and South of Market, a border that used to lie around Ninth or Tenth Street. The city eventually prevailed in its negotiations with the SP over the rightof-way needed for the southern part of the Mission Freeway. That section— between Daly City and the neighborhood of Glen Park—was constructed, but it connected with the Bayshore Freeway near the Bernal Cut and penetrated no farther north into the Mission District. The push for freeways elicited an outraged response from San Francisco’s neighborhoods, and highway planning would soon be debated in full public view. At the same time, however, another round of transporta-

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tion planning was going on behind closed doors, planning that also had profound consequences for the Mission.

Regional Rapid Transit and the Passive Mission Proposals for creating a rapid-transit subway beneath Market Street dated from before the great disaster of 1906 and became a more serious topic of conversation in its aftermath.106 In fact, when he served on the Board of Supervisors, the MPA’s Matt Sullivan backed a scheme that would have created a subway down Market, beginning at the Ferry Building, then branching in two directions: one into the Mission down Valencia Street, terminating at Twenty-Ninth Street, and the other north along Van Ness Avenue, terminating at the bay.107 Sullivan’s favored plan was not brought to fruition because there had been insufficient political will among elected officials— and insufficient interest among voters—to push through the large bond issue that would be required. Virtually the same thing happened in 1900, 1911, 1912, 1913, 1915, 1921, 1931, 1936, and 1937.108 From the beginning, opponents of the various plans argued that there was insufficient traffic along Market to justify the outlay and that revenue from fares would never cover operating expenses, let alone service the debt incurred.109 In the immediate postwar period, however, congestion was so severe in downtown San Francisco that it became obvious, to city leaders and citizens alike, that new infrastructure was needed. In 1950, Planning Commission Director Opperman invoked the legacy of Daniel Burnham, whose 1905 plan for San Francisco noted the “pressing need” for a Market Street subway.110 The political climate was now such that an underground rapid transit system seemed a real possibility. In 1947, the Joint Army-Navy Board had surprised all parties when it recommended not only a southern crossing but also an underwater tube connecting downtown Oakland and downtown San Francisco.111 Mayor Robinson took this proposal seriously, and in 1949 he appointed an advisory group. Prominent members included Cyril Magnin, a leading San Francisco department store merchant; Henry North, of the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company; Alan Browne, of the Bank of America; and Arthur Dolan, of the Blyth and Company investment banking firm.112 (James Zellerbach was also a prominent supporter of regional rapid transit.113) All of the members on the advisory group represented downtown corporate capital. In both San Francisco and Oakland, the same forces that pushed for highways, bridges, and off-street parking also pushed for rapid transit. The downtown-centric planning regimes saw no conflict between cars and

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trains, and understood, in fact, that both were needed to alleviate traffic.114 While chambers of commerce on both sides of the bay were crucial to the push for rapid transit, San Francisco’s new planning regime was the driving force behind BART. Downtown San Francisco had a number of reasons to want regional rapid transit. City leaders had long believed that a subway system would eventually be necessary to reduce traffic downtown, and the regional system held out the possibility of connecting downtown San Francisco not only to surrounding residential neighborhoods but also to surrounding cities, thereby avoiding the need to create two separate transit systems (which it would eventually be forced to do).115 Suburbanization was under way, and no policy was going to completely reverse the trend. However, regional rapid transit provided the possibility of channeling some of those energies. If San Francisco could continue to bring shoppers and office workers into downtown, then it could consolidate its role as a center of commerce, a headquarters city, for the region, and indeed for the West Coast. With these interests in mind, Mayor Robinson’s advisory committee approached the 1951 state legislative session with a proposal to create a multicounty study and planning commission.116 After considerable wrangling among the various cities, particularly between San Francisco and Oakland, about the composition and aims of the proposed entity, the Bay Area Rapid Transit Commission (BARTC) was finally created. In addition to San Francisco, the commission also contained representatives from cities in Alameda, Marin, San Mateo, and Contra Costa Counties. Through the early 1950s, representatives of BARTC’s many competing interests engaged in a set of complex and contentious negotiations, battling over a range of possible organizational schemes and funding mechanisms, as well as possible designs of the system itself. In 1957, the effort cleared a hurdle when it moved beyond the preliminary review phase to create the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BARTD), yet the battles continued. Suburban cities had to weigh their desire to be linked into a regional system against the possible threat of becoming mere satellites to San Francisco or Oakland. How could they prevent themselves from becoming little more than bedroom communities whose own economic development would be hindered by the central cities? Equitable distribution of costs was of course another issue, and San Francisco’s desire for an extensive system within its own city limits created tension. Most cities in the system were slated for only one BART station, but at one point in the planning process, San Francisco was slated for twelve— four along Market Street, six along a branch leading out through Geary

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Boulevard then across the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin, and two along a Mission branch heading south for San Mateo County.117 At another stage, when San Francisco was also lobbying for a line into the Sunset District, the city was asking for eighteen stations.118 Leaders of cities in San Mateo County, in particular, felt that they were being asked to subsidize not only San Francisco’s rapid transit but also its economic dominance of the area.119 It was these concerns that led San Mateo to opt out of the entire system, though it eventually agreed to have a station in Daly City, at the southern border of San Francisco.120 Marin’s inclusion in BARTD had always been uncertain. The way the district was organized, tax revenues from San Mateo would have subsidized the expensive second deck on the Golden Gate Bridge that would be needed to connect Marin to San Francisco. So after San Mateo left, Marin had to follow suit unless it wished to foot a larger portion of the bill.121 With Marin gone, the entire line that led out Geary Boulevard to the Golden Gate Bridge went with it. That meant six stations within San Francisco. Planning energies were now focused on the Mission line that would connect to Daly City. In 1956, a study commissioned by BARTC recommended elevated tracks along Valencia Street, with only one stop in the Mission District, at Twenty-Second Street.122 This was unacceptable to San Francisco planners for two reasons. First, they had only very recently decided to abandon the elevated Mission Freeway because it would disrupt business and substantially reduce tax revenue, so they had no interest in allowing an elevated rail to accomplish the job now. Second, having lost a substantial number of stations when the Marin and Sunset lines were lost, San Francisco’s planners were anxious to bring more service to the city. In 1960, Mayor George Christopher organized a commission that recommended putting the line underground, moving it from Valencia to Mission Street, and adding three stations in the district, at Sixteenth Street, Twentieth Street, and Twenty-Fourth Street, and another just south at Thirtieth Street.123 BARTD compromised and accepted two stations on Mission Street, at Sixteenth and Twenty-Fourth. This was where the system stood when it went up for a bond issue in 1962. More than two-thirds of San Francisco voters approved the plan; southeastern San Francisco, where the Mission is located, voted in favor in even higher numbers.124 It is difficult to know why residents of the Mission voted in favor of BART. The Mission Enterprise enthusiastically supported Elmer Robinson’s run for mayor in 1947 and published articles that approvingly described his plan for improved rapid transit throughout the city. This plan included a tunnel through Dolores Hill, connecting the Mission

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to neighborhoods west of Twin Peaks, a perennial aim of the old MPA.125 It seems likely that the Mission Merchants’ long-standing desire for improved transportation, and their goodwill toward Mayor Robinson, translated into support for BART. It is also possible that with the freeway revolt still fresh in their minds, San Franciscans in general voted for BART because they believed it would forestall future freeway pressure.126 Whatever their exact reasons for supporting the planning effort, it is clear that residents and merchants in the Mission were not much involved. San Francisco’s representatives on BARTC and BARTD were employed by the major banks, investment firms, and merchants and were affiliated with the Downtown Association, the Chamber of Commerce, and the B-Z Committee. Arthur Dolan, of Blyth and Company, was a leading BART activist from the first mention of the idea through the bond issue of 1962.127 As with all of the city’s immediate postwar transportation plans, BART was a creature of downtown San Francisco. Recent work on the relationship between neighborhood groups and the downtown business community in Chicago provides a surprising point of contrast to San Francisco. In the immediate postwar period, the downtown business community was poorly organized, leaving individual neighborhood groups to plan for their own areas.128 These neighborhood groups were not fighting to stop the radically transformative plans of a unified downtown business community, because no such community existed. In this environment, neighborhood groups were even able to capture federal urban renewal monies for their own projects, an opportunity that was unimaginable in immediate postwar San Francisco. When one looks at the trajectory of centralized planning from the Progressive Era through the postwar period, it appears that Chicago and San Francisco stood in inverse relationship to each other. Guided by the Commercial Club, the Chicago Plan Commission had succeeded in unifying the city’s business elite around Burnham’s vision of centralized urban planning. This unity enabled the commission to impose its vision on neighborhood groups. When the commission tried again to unify the business community in the 1940s and 1950s, it “was not up to the task.”129 In San Francisco, by contrast, the proponents of Burnham’s centralized vision were disorganized, leaving neighborhood groups like the MPA to guide planning for their areas through the Progressive Era. But even as World War II still raged, San Francisco’s downtown business community formed a powerful unified front behind the B-Z Committee and the SFPHA. For decades after the war, this planning regime controlled all federal monies for transportation and urban renewal, and succeeded in remaking all of

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San Francisco according to the needs of downtown. It was not until 1958 that Chicago’s downtown business community would achieve comparable unity, behind the new Central Area Committee.130 Thereafter, the balance of planning power in Chicago came to resemble San Francisco’s circumstance, with a downtown-led coalition dominating whatever neighborhood planning was being done.131 All of this suggests that there is considerable variation in how cities planned in the immediate postwar period. There is no question that many metropolitan centers around the country saw the unification of a corporate business community, rooted in the physical space of downtown, that pursued federal funding to remake their respective cities.132 But it is a mistake to assume that this happened everywhere, or at least that it happened in the same way everywhere, with the same consequences for the political calculus among government, business, and neighborhoods.

Conclusion During the 1930s, the corporate interests that were associated with downtown San Francisco had proved adept at channeling New Deal funds toward their own planning agendas. In the immediate postwar period, they consolidated their power, centralizing urban planning power to a degree that the city had never before seen. This coalition between corporations and government marked both an institutional and a cultural shift. It was not only that the postwar planning regime successfully channeled resources toward its agenda; it also succeeded in promoting that agenda to the citizens of San Francisco (even the youngest ones) as a set of commonsense and indeed inevitable solutions. In this new regime, the cause of progress trumped all other concerns, and progress meant a further fiscalization of land use: physical space was to be used in the most economically efficient manner possible. But economic efficiency depended greatly on the eye of the beholder. The MPA and other neighborhood groups had always been attuned to the value of land, but their priorities were different than those of the municipality. The city wanted to minimize municipal expenditure on services, and the neighborhood groups wanted to maximize municipal investment in services in their respective neighborhoods. While the municipality wished to increase tax revenue, the MPA wished to boost property values but to keep tax rates low. Both the MPA and the city wanted maximize the efficient circulation of goods and workers, but where from, and where to? The MPA had worked hard to secure rail, road, and even harbor improvements that

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would consolidate the Mission as a central business district, capable of challenging downtown. But with downtown business interests now dominating the city planning agenda, individual neighborhoods began to figure less as destinations for goods and workers, and more as potential traffic corridors carrying goods and workers to and from downtown. Since the late nineteenth century, the Mission District had functioned as a city within a city, not only as a culturally distinct area of San Francisco but also as an institutionally coherent actor in planning debates. But San Francisco’s freeway plan now raised the question of whether the neighborhood would even remain a coherent physical entity through the postwar period. In response, the neighborhood began to mobilize. In the historiography of postwar America, the construction of freeways marked a moment in which neighborhoods became important to city planning debates. When the first sections of the Embarcadero Freeway went up in San Francisco in 1955, residents condemned the structure as a steel and concrete monster that was destroying the character of their city for the benefit of suburban commuters.133 Over the coming decades, a freeway revolt would sweep through cities across the country, from Miami to Seattle, and from San Diego to Burlington.134 Broadly speaking, the revolt was marked by single-issue coalitions that used protest tactics, lobbying campaigns, and lawsuits to attempt to prevent freeways from traversing their local areas. The planning energies expressed in the revolt were often episodic and reactionary. These were single-issue groups that were concerned almost exclusively with the effort to “Stop the Road.”135 The San Francisco freeway revolt has largely been explained as a contest pitting the aging city against the emerging suburbs, and indeed it was that.136 But the freeway revolt also marked the first salvo in a battle to reestablish the neighborhood as a comprehensive planning unit. The Mission only played a bit part in the revolt, but by the early 1960s, the neighborhood would become important in urban planning debates— and not just because it had the potential to form single-issue protest groups. Beneath the din of the freeway revolt, neighborhood residents and institutions were forging coalitions that would soon emerge to advance a vision of comprehensive urban planning at the scale of the neighborhood, reinvigorating the Mission’s deeply rooted traditions of self-governance.

NINE

Latino as Worker: The Changing Politics of Race in the City and the Neighborhood

In the early twentieth century, leaders of the Mission District typically found that their ideas about urban planning were in sync with those of the city government. Indeed, many of the leaders of the Mission were the leaders of the city. That began to change during the 1930s, and by the immediate postwar period, there was a sharp divergence between the city and the neighborhood when it came to ideas about planning and urban life. Nowhere was this divergence more pronounced than around the subject of race. While citywide agencies operated under discriminatory policies and assumptions, the institutions of the Mission District became more racially egalitarian than they had ever been. The new planning regime’s attitudes were legible not only in the discourses of the downtown lobbying groups—like the San Francisco Planning and Housing Association (SFPHA) and the Blyth-Zellerbach Committee (B-Z)—but also through the practices of the Housing Authority (SFHA), Redevelopment Agency (SFRA), and Department of City Planning (DCP). In this environment, the prospects of any African American hoping to find decent housing in a safe, affordable neighborhood were particularly constrained. As for Latinos, city agencies continued for the moment to regard them as close-enough-to-white, provided they were not “of mixed Indian extraction.” In the Mission, however, the race picture started to look very different. The Merchants, local Catholic parish churches, and social service providers all began to explicitly racialize Latinos in a way that they had not in the past. Surprisingly, however, such racialization was not accompanied with discriminatory attitudes and practices. On the contrary, neighborhood institutions began to recognize Latinos as Latinos (rather than “Latins”) and to welcome them as such. Over the coming decades, this goodwill would

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be mobilized to form broad-based, multiethnic coalitions—coalitions that would have enough support to challenge the city’s increasingly racist planning practices. But those coalitions found their roots in the Mission of the 1950s. The first neighborhood-based planning exercise of the postwar period would come when a social service agency called the Mission Neighborhood Centers (MNC) produced a study of the Mission in 1960. The document pointed out problems with a deteriorating environment and inadequate services, but it also identified strengths in the neighborhood’s multiethnic character and long-standing institutions. The organization recommended a self-help approach to neighborhood revitalization, a strategy that was calculated to forestall any possible intervention from the SFRA. In order to understand why the neighborhood groups were concerned about possible interventions, it is useful to begin by considering how race figured in the ideologies of San Francisco’s postwar planning regime.

Racial Attitudes in Citywide Planning According to the San Francisco Master Plan, the city needed a comprehensive urban renewal program to combat blight. The primary methods for accomplishing renewal were to be conservation (the protection of stable areas through enforcement of building and zoning codes), rehabilitation (the restoration of existing structures that were showing early signs of blight), and redevelopment (the clearance and reconstruction of already blighted areas).1 The fundamental criterion for assessing blight was, again, the balance sheet. Did an area use more in services than it earned in tax revenue? If so, it was blighted. But by 1955, the DCP had developed more fine-grained measures, which it expressed in a list of weighted criteria. The highest possible score was eighty-nine, but any “areas with a penalty score of sixty or more were classified as suitable for redevelopment”; scores between forty and fifty-nine marked an area “as suitable for rehabilitation”; while scores between twenty and thirty-nine were appropriate for conservation.2 Mixed use was the most important criterion for assessing blight (seven penalty points), followed by traffic accidents and block size (both six points). Near the bottom of the list were tuberculosis rates and “nonwhite population” (both three points).3 So blight was not all about race, but race certainly mattered. In some senses the postwar renewal discussions reflected the same racial attitudes that were in place when the HOLC conducted its survey of San Francisco in 1937. As Albert Broussard has shown, San Francisco was relatively welcoming to African Americans in the period before World War II,

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at least when compared to the cities of the South and Northeast. This comparatively tolerant attitude had roots in the Civil War, and in the city’s nineteenth-century anxieties about being insufficiently American, a foreign and barbarous place. To welcome African Americans was to demonstrate sophistication, metropolitanism, and, most importantly, allegiance to the Union. Since the city’s black population was never large, welcoming them carried few risks—there just were not enough African Americans to significantly impact the local labor market, political institutions, or cultural character. In the postwar period, however, the city’s historically tolerant attitude toward African Americans began to change as it became clear that the wave of war workers who had migrated from the South did not intend to return there.4 While the elite prewar discourse had often exhibited paternalistic language toward African Americans, it was rare to encounter statements that smacked of Jim Crow racism.5 But such comments became more common in discussions of urban renewal, even well into the civil rights era. In 1960, for example, the Crown Zellerbach Corporation wrote that the GearyFillmore neighborhood “presented the city with a problem unique in its history. It had degenerated into one of California’s worst slums. Its population consisted mainly of 35,000 Negroes.”6 In some instances, these same messages would be coded. For example, in mounting the case for why the Geary-Fillmore neighborhood should be razed, the SFPHA described the neighborhood as follows: “It’s not white. It is gray, brown and an indeterminate shade of dirty black.”7 The cover art for the pamphlet borrowed directly from science fiction, showing a black blob extending tendrils from the Geary-Fillmore over the entire map of San Francisco: a black blight spreading through a healthy body (fig. 9.1). The remedy was clear. Immediately after the Redevelopment Agency was established in 1948, its first order of business would be to level the Geary-Fillmore. But while citywide attitudes toward African Americans were hardening, attitudes toward Latino populations were much the same as they had been when the HOLC surveyed the neighborhood. The Mission received penalties for “absence of setbacks from front and rear lot lines and for deterioration,” “age of dwelling units,” some “mixed land use,” “traffic accidents and traffic conditions,” “deficiencies in neighborhood facilities,” and “overcrowding and monthly rent under $40.”8 The report did not classify the Mission as blighted but stated that the neighborhood “should be considered susceptible to blight.”9 Like the Master Plan before it, the 1955 report called for a mixture of rehabilitation and conservation in the Mission (except in part of the no-lined area of the northeast, which was suitable

Figure 9.1. Cover of “Blight and Taxes.” San Francisco Planning and Housing Association, 1947.

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for redevelopment). The DCP’s report did not find that the Mission District had a substantial nonwhite population, in spite of the fact that the area was somewhere between 11 percent and 23 percent Latino by 1955.10 So when it came to discussions about where the powers of urban renewal should be brought to bear, the DCP and the SFRA both exhibited increasingly racist attitudes toward African Americans, even while they continued to render Latinos invisible. The SFHA exhibited the same pattern. Latinos were almost certainly living in Valencia Gardens from the beginning, even though the housing project was open only to whites. In other words, Valencia Gardens was not integrated as far as the SFHA was concerned; Latinos were admitted only insofar as they could be considered white. This was not the same as passing, since non-mestizo Latinos were legally white, but any African Americans who wished to live in public housing would have to pass. As African Americans, they were excluded outright. This segregationist policy would first be challenged in 1952. Invoking the neighborhood pattern guideline, the SFHA denied an apartment at North Beach Place to Mattie Banks, her husband, James Charley, and Tobbie Cain, all African Americans. The NAACP mounted a legal campaign that culminated in Banks v. SFHA (1954).11 In what would become an early landmark case in the civil rights movement, the San Francisco Superior Court found that the neighborhood pattern policy violated the Fourteenth Amendment.12 In response, the SFHA set aside twenty units in North Beach Place for African Americans, as ordered by the court, but it also appealed the ruling, continuing to defend the neighborhood pattern policy on the grounds that the court’s decision would “spark white flight.”13 The SFHA lost in Appellate Court, and both the California State Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the case (the latter in May 1954). Even after Banks v. SFHA, the authority continued to drag its heels, yet the process of integrating public housing was under way.14 All of the entities that could be considered part of San Francisco’s postwar planning regime—both government agencies and their affiliated lobbying groups—exhibited a similar mix of racial attitudes in the immediate postwar period. African Americans were increasingly unwelcome, while Latinos remained mostly invisible. The subject of Latinos’ status in the late 1950s highlights a growing divergence between the ideas and aspirations of the postwar planning regime, on the one hand, and those of the Mission District’s prominent organizations, on the other. While the housing authority and city planners continued to regard Latinos as close-enoughto-white, the institutions of the Mission District began to acknowledge and accommodate the growing (racialized) Latino presence.

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Latino as Worker: Neighborhood Institutions and the Politics of Belonging Built in 1909, the Mission Promotion Association (MPA) hall was the home of the neighborhood’s most influential organization, a de facto governing body that drove policy pertaining to the built environment of the Mission District and most of the southern half of San Francisco. The building was constructed in a Spanish colonial style, with white stucco walls and red-tiled eaves, in order to advertise the Mission District’s claim to civic legitimacy as the oldest continuously inhabited section of the city. By the 1950s, however, the red-tile appliqué was long since stripped away, having been “modernized.” In 1957, the hall was taken over by a Mexican restaurant called El Borrego (“the lamb”) after having stood vacant for years. The proprietors of El Borrego did not reclaim a Spanish building; rather, they moved into one of many nondescript commercial properties that were increasingly coming vacant by the end of the decade. By the mid-1960s a restaurant called La Cumbre (“the summit”) moved into the space. Next door, the Tile Helpers Local No. 7 and the Terrazo Helpers Local No. 115 maintained their offices.15 At the time of writing, the old MPA hall is still occupied by La Cumbre, though the neighboring unions moved away decades ago. The story of the MPA hall reflects the story of the larger neighborhood. In an earlier era, Mission-based improvement clubs and merchants’ associations wielded a great deal of influence over the planning of their neighborhood, but with the ascendance of a downtown-based planning regime, these groups became much less important. Union power also waned. Census figures show that by 1950 the no-lined area of the northeastern Mission District was more than 25 percent Latino; the heart of the Mission reached that figure by 1960.16 While these changes did create some tension, they did not trigger a precipitous sequence of disinvestment, white flight, and “decline”—as much of the literature on postwar urban neighborhoods might lead one to expect. In fact, rather than ignore or challenge the neighborhood’s new population, the unions, merchants, social service providers, and parish churches recognized and accommodated Latinos. In the case of the unions, some of these changes were made under duress. In the 1950s the NAACP began pushing the SFHA to include a nondiscrimination clause in its maintenance and construction contracts, as part of a strategy to force unions affiliated with the Building Trades Council (BTC) to integrate.17 Movement on this issue would not come until 1964, a fact that illustrated the continuing racial conservatism of the building trades,

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at least when it came to African Americans. But the BTC-affiliated Construction and Building Workers, Local 261, had already created a Latino caucus: the Obreros (laborers). The Obreros caucus was based in the Mission, where it opened its own hall—the Centro Social Obrero—in 1959, an act that would have been impossible in the early twentieth-century Mission District.18 When the Building Trades Temple burned in 1959, the BTC itself moved to Market Street, leaving the Obreros as the most powerful union in the Mission. Though they would never rival the power of their parent organization, the Obreros would soon exert considerable influence on the planning of the neighborhood, and on San Francisco politics more broadly. During this period, the ever-pragmatic Mission Merchants began not only to accommodate Latinos but also to demonstrate a greater understanding of their new customers. Before the war, the Merchants had often put on festivals that revolved around a commercialized imperialist nostalgia, an “Old Mission”–themed romance with the neighborhood’s “Spanish” and “Latin” past. But in 1961 the festival was renamed the “Fiesta Latino-Americana.”19 So what was once “Latin” had become actually “Latino.” There is evidence that some of the old identity politics persisted into the 1960s. A 1962 Chronicle article about the neighborhood observed that “hardly a store on Mission street fails to have a sign in the window: ‘Se habla Espanol.’ (One adds a touch of class by proclaiming that ‘Castillian’ is also spoken there.)”20 But these distinctions were also being challenged during this period. More Latino-owned businesses were appearing throughout the neighborhood, and more Anglo-owned businesses were advertising to Latinos. All the major institutions in the Mission began to accommodate Latinos, but none more so than the Catholic Church. The old German national parish of St. Anthony’s, on Twenty-Fourth and Alabama Streets, is a case in point. Because its German-speaking parishioners were first becoming English-speaking parishioners and were then dispersing geographically by the end of World War II, the parish reverted to territorial status in 1948. Shortly thereafter it became the first Catholic parish in the Mission to offer some Spanish-language services (though not yet mass).21 In 1960 the Catholic newspaper the Monitor reported that it “has been some years since San Francisco’s Mission district last heard ‘grosser Gott, wir Joben Dich’ belted out in a solid Bavarian baritone. The steaming kettles of biersuppe are gone. Menus no longer mention kartoffelpfannekuchen. Today it’s tortillas.”22 The article narrated these cultural shifts in an elegiac tone, but not a bitter one.

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Similar changes were under way at the traditionally Irish parish of St. Peter’s, just to the southeast of St. Anthony’s.23 The moment when the clergy at St. Peter’s recognized a need to minister to a new public came around 1946, with the arrival of Father Nicolas Farana, a priest of Italian descent. Early in his tenure at St. Peter’s, Father Farana observed that there were twelve Spanish-language Pentecostal and Baptist storefront churches within the parish boundaries.24 Farana suggested that the Catholic Church should also open storefront churches: “the idea,” he explained, “was to meet competition with competition.”25 Though the Church did not act on the “little parish” plan until the 1960s, years after Farana had left, the discussion opened the door to engagement with the growing Latino community.26 In 1950 the parish appointed a Nicaraguan priest, Luis Almendares, as assistant pastor. Almendares began hearing confessions and giving counsel, as well as hosting “a Spanish Holy Hour on radio, reciting the rosary and giving a short sermon in Spanish, which was broadcast throughout the Bay Area,” in the early 1950s.27 By the early 1960s there was increasing pressure within St. Peter’s to hold mass in Spanish. Years later, Father James Casey remembered that the “English-speaking Masses were poorly attended, and a lot of the people at those masses were Spanish-speaking.”28 Casey and other members of the ministry told the aging pastor, Timothy Hennessey, “that we thought we could really fill up the church with a Spanish-speaking Mass.”29 For most members of the ministry a transition seemed inevitable, but the change would not be free of tension. Concerned that the Latino faithful were switching to Protestant denominations in the early 1960s, a parish employee named Isaura de Rodriguez presented Hennessey with a petition, bearing 500 signatures, to hold Spanish-language services and even masses—this in spite of the fact that all Catholic masses were still held in Latin before the Second Vatican Council of 1962. Hennessey’s first response was: “Why are the people so lazy? They should learn English.”30 But after a concerted campaign by Rodriguez, Hennessey relented, right on the heels of Vatican II. The first Spanish-language mass was held in 1964 and was attended by more than one thousand people.31 At one of these masses, Father Hennessey found himself practicing announcements in Spanish when one of the older parishioners challenged him, asking, “Why did you give in to them?”32 Though Hennessey himself had recently regarded the neighborhood’s Spanish-speaking Catholics as lazy, in the coming years he would become a crucial bridge across the ethnic divide. Father Casey remembered that Hennessey “called on the affection he enjoyed with the older Irish to smooth out relations between

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the groups, reconciling the older parishioners to the need for Hispanic ministry.”33 Casey recalled that one event in particular forced the old guard to “face up to the fact that it was a Spanish-speaking” parish. Every year Hennessey had held a mass to celebrate an old parish hero, Father Peter Yorke, who had been known in the Mission and beyond as the “labor priest.” Each year the mass would get smaller because the older Irish parishioners “were dying off or losing interest.”34 One year in the early 1960s, Hennessey and Casey found that the mass was attended by only twenty or so Irish and about one thousand Spanish-speaking parishioners. “Finally at the end of the Mass . . . we asked the Spanish-speaking to sing a hymn. They just blasted out. It was so beautiful.”35 In spite of their heartfelt participation, the moment also dramatized the fact that the character of the congregation had changed—Yorke was not their hero, but a hero for the older parishioners. In the following years, the ever-smaller group of those celebrating the life of Father Yorke held their observance in the cemetery where he was buried, freeing up the space of St. Peter’s. Though these changes were certainly painful for many of the older Irish residents, all available accounts suggest that most did indeed “face up” to the reality that the Mission was now a largely Latino neighborhood. In fact, members of the Catholic ministry recalled that there was more tension among Latinos of various national backgrounds than there was between Latinos and Irish. Father Casey recalled that the Mexicans, who were mostly from rural backgrounds, had many cultural differences with the “Nicaraguans, Puerto Ricans and El Salvadorans” who had endured “that ground-grinding poverty in the city” of their home countries.36 Subtle differences in personal bearing and life experience no doubt exacerbated tensions when small conflicts arose over the programming of church space. One such conflict could be expected every December, when the Nicaraguan celebration of the Immaculate Conception fell at about the same time as the Mexican celebration of Our Lady of Guadalupe.37 While there were occasional squabbles among and within all of the major ethnic groups—Latino, Irish, and Italian—the clergy of St. Peter’s recalled that there was an overarching class identification that took precedence. To explain the dynamic, it is worth quoting Father James Hagan at length: There were an awful lot of people who lived in the Mission District who liked the idea of living with their neighbors, from whatever part of the world, they were neighbors. Those are basically the people who stayed in the neighbor-

220 / Chapter Nine hood. They went along with anybody who came. They preserved and added an awful lot to the neighborhood itself. People talk about the differences between ethnic communities, but I noticed that there were a number of people there who stood for other things besides their own ethnicity. They reached out and got to know the people and they were all considerate of others. They expected things to be bilingual in the events that went on. It wasn’t only in the church where there was a reflection upon their life; it was in the school and in the labor unions. I remember there was an old Irishman named Luke O’Riley, who was a grass roots organizer in his union, and there was a guy named Jose Gomez, who could hardly speak English, and the two of them got along famously.  .  .  . There were so many people in the neighborhood who enjoyed being with their fellow workers. They had a common sense and dignity about the working person, which was more important than what their country of origin was. I can think of people who chose to live there because of the ethnic diversity, not in spite of it. That included traditional old-line Catholics.38

According to Hagan, older parishioners’ acceptance of the new population was not born only out of resignation. Rather, many of them felt a solidarity rooted in a respect for the figure of the worker. While Hagan’s account, recorded thirty years after the fact, seems to paint a rosy picture of ethnic solidarity rooted in labor traditions, there are corroborating accounts from many different perspectives. In 1962, Chronicle reporter David Braaten published a series of investigative reports on the Mission that explored the neighborhood’s multiethnicity in some depth. He conducted one particularly telling interview with “Supervisor Joseph Tinney, an Irish teamster’s son who, though he now lives in a ritzier section of town, was born and raised in the Mission and still has his law office there.” According to Tinney, “People in the Mission aren’t inclined to be prejudiced against a foreigner, for the simple reason that they or their parents were probably foreigners themselves.” All accounts suggest that there was indeed a multiethnic solidarity in the Mission that was grounded in the shared experience of migration and in a broadly shared reverence for labor. In Braaten’s telling, it was not race or nationality that might produce tension, but rather a real or perceived disrespect for the working man. Racial minorities were probably just fine, provided they were clean-cut working men. But a bearded beatnik? There is a limit to the goodwill, though. The Mission is still the home of the horny-handed union man, the skilled or semi-skilled laborer who puts in

Latino as Worker / 221 a hard day’s work for his paycheck. Sensing this, beatniks and other shiftless elements steer clear of the district. The different nationalities tend to seek out their own, in bars and lodges and clubs, but the way they get along when their paths do cross would drive any self-respecting bigot right out of his mind. An otherwise friendly innkeeper put it: “The only beards we see in the Mission are white and Irish, and not so many of those. If a beatnik was to walk here, he’d probably get thrown out by the customers before I got a chance to refuse to serve him.”39

As the union stronghold of San Francisco, the Mission District had never lacked in respect for the working person, but in the early part of the twentieth century, unions and their allies only gave that respect on circumscribed terms. Even the internationalist faction of San Francisco labor did not regard people of Asian descent as dignified working people, but rather as “invading hordes.”40 Father Yorke, the old “labor priest” of St. Peter’s, was himself a vocal proponent of Asiatic exclusion in the early twentieth century.41 During that period the public was composed of local businesspeople and white workers; the public interest was the economic prosperity of those same groups. Insofar as nonwhite workers competed with white workers, the former were regarded as a threat to the public interest. Having embraced the principles of economic equality, promoted by the public-works-oriented New Deal agencies, the idea of racial equality was not a cognitive leap for most Mission residents. As Hagan’s impressions suggest, those white residents who did not feel that it was in the public interest to promote racial equality were more likely to have moved out west, to the “fog belt” neighborhoods, or out to the suburbs by the 1950s. But there were many others who liked the idea of being part of an ethnically expanding public, one founded on “a common sense and dignity about the working person, which was more important than what [a person’s] country of origin was.”42 Much of the Anglo population remained in the Mission through the era normally associated with white flight. On its own, this fact is not terribly surprising. After all, much of the white Mission was Catholic, and Catholic parishes tended to keep their parishioners rooted to their neighborhoods.43 Only a small fraction of Catholic parishes are defined by nationality or language; the vast majority are territorial, meaning that they are “defined by strict physical boundaries. Within its boundaries, the parish church exercises monopoly jurisdiction, receiving the loyalty of all Catholics within the parish who identify with a territorial church.”44 Catholics are rooted not only to their parish churches but also to the community centers, schools,

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and other affiliated institutional spaces. Furthermore, the Catholic Church is hierarchical. “Because the parish can survive only with the participation of an ordained priest, lay Catholics must submit to the authority of their priest and to the hierarchy that assigns him.”45 None of this apply to Jews, which is a primary reason why the Jews left Boston during the immediate postwar period while the Catholics stayed. So while it is not surprising that white Catholics stayed in the Mission, it is surprising that they did not seem to feel threatened by their new neighbors. White Bostonian Catholics, by contrast, mounted a violent defense of their neighborhoods against the encroachment of African Americans. Territoriality—this “sense of turf”—often characterized the culture even when race was not a factor; many Catholics defended their neighborhoods not only against other white groups but even against coreligionists.46 For example, in the 1930s Czech Catholics in suburban Chicago greeted incoming German Catholics with “hostility.”47 In the Mission, the story was very different. Not only did the established Catholics welcome new Catholics, but they welcomed people they regarded as being of a different race, people who even introduced a different language into their mass. This openness is certainly attributable to the Mission’s evolving labor tradition and to its long-standing diversity among white ethnic groups. But further research is needed to determine whether this orientation is also explained by the culture of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, Western regional culture, or other unknown factors. What is clear, however, is that this orientation allowed the Mission to remain comparatively stable through tough times, and that this stability would soon be leveraged in contests over planning power.

The Mission Neighborhood Centers: Planning the Egalitarian City within a City Even though the Mission remained stable compared to areas that did experience rapid disinvestment, some troubling social trends were still developing: housing stock deteriorated, single-family homes were converted to crowded apartments, the arrest rate among young people spiked dramatically, as did the high school dropout rate.48 Social service agencies had always been a presence in the neighborhood, but in this new environment, they took on increasing importance, becoming a locus of organizational life in the Mission in a way that the unions and the improvement clubs had once been. The Good Samaritans had been in the neighborhood since 1910; the Precita Valley Community Club Association had been in the

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neighborhood since 1921; and the Mission Community Center (previously the Girls’ Club) had been in the neighborhood since 1942.49 In 1958, these agencies pooled their resources, merging to become the Mission Neighborhood Centers (MNC). The consolidated organization was supported by the Bay Area Crusade (part of the United Community Fund) and the Episcopal Diocese of California, and was affiliated with the National Federation of Settlements and Neighborhood Centers, an organization founded by Jane Addams in 1911.50 With a focus on cultural programming and on counseling that emphasized assimilation and self-help, the MNC’s activities very much reflected its settlement-house heritage. Because its leaders understood that the Mission was facing challenges relating to increased poverty and because they also understood that the redevelopment agency was targeting some poor neighborhoods for clearance, the MNC undertook a study—“A Self-Portrait of the Greater Mission District”—that it published in 1960.51 The purpose of the study was to identify problems and suggest solutions before the Mission deteriorated to the point where “debilitating and costly clearances” seemed the only option.52 The study is notable because it gave the MNC a seat at the table when the mayor, the SFRA, and various other city agencies began discussing an urban renewal plan for the Mission in the early 1960s. But the study is also notable for providing a window into the changing social dynamics of the neighborhood, particularly with respect to ethnic relations. The “Self-Portrait” was an informal and self-described “impressionistic” study.53 The methodology section states that the researchers began by establishing the “facts.” The first order of business was to survey the community: Ask questions of individuals like: “Is there an increase in juvenile delinquency in this area?” “Is there an increase in Spanish-Americans, such as Mexicans or Puerto Ricans, in your neighborhood?” “Are there more people moving in or out of this area?” Whom do you ask? Ask mothers, fathers, kids standing on the corner, ask policemen, superintendents, nurses, ministers, priests.54

The study seemed to illustrate several biases in the authors’ expectations, placing “an increase in Spanish-Americans” next to “an increase in juvenile delinquency” as factors that would apparently contribute to the deterioration of the neighborhood. But while in some places the framing of the discussion gives the impression that the researchers were not asking Latinos for their feedback on

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the state of the Mission, in fact the study reported that Central Americans and Mexicans were both represented in the sample.55 More surprising was the fact that the “results were contrary to our expectation. We had anticipated that racial tensions, employment problems, lack of facilities for senior citizens, school and educational problems of various kinds would be frequently given as the social problems in the area. This was not the case.” Rather, members of the community reported that “adult alcoholism, juvenile alcoholism, juvenile delinquency, multi-problem families, broken homes, [and] poor housing” were the Mission’s principal challenges.56 The study did identify “growing tension among groups because of race, nationality or cultural differences,” but such problems were confined to young people, resulting in “some self-segregation of recreational facilities.”57 The MNC understood these problems under the broader category of juvenile delinquency rather than “racial tensions,” which the authors explicitly stated was not (to their surprise) one of the Mission’s primary challenges. There is no question that some older residents associated the troubling socioeconomic indicators with the influx of Latinos.58 Yet that was a minority opinion. The “Self-Portrait” did identify problems relating specifically to the increased “Spanish-American” population, but these were not associated with increased crime or racial tension. Rather, the fundamental problem was difficulty in assimilation. Again reflecting its settlement-house affiliations, one of the MNC’s primary recommendations for the Mission was to increase the offerings of “Citizenship, English and Americanization Classes.”59 Though the MNC took a patronizing tone toward Latinos, it was a positively inflected, celebratory kind of patronizing, referring to the Mission as a “Colorful District with many Interesting Places and Varying Customs.”60 The self-portrait study also partook in the nostalgia that had characterized the Mission’s cultural life for so long: “The restaurants, the stores and the theaters boast a familiar sign . . . ‘Se habla Espanol.’ Has perhaps the ghost of a vanquished Conquistador returned to the land once his?”61 What distinguished this instance of imperialist nostalgia from its prewar variants was the fact the MNC was here celebrating an actual presence: the ghost was in the Mission today, having taken the form of a poor immigrant whom the MNC—in its settlement-house, missionary orientation—wished to help. Irving Kriegsfeld, head of the MNC, told a Chronicle reporter that he viewed the “influx of Latin Americans as an encouraging sign”; in fact, he expressed more concern about the possibility that Latinos would leave the neighborhood once their economic situation improved.62 Kriegsfeld

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was not the only observer who saw this possibility. David Braaten concluded his series of investigative reports on the Mission with the following prediction: “It will continue to be what it has been for generations: A lusty, brawling city, a vital part of San Francisco, yet independent from it, where working stiffs will raise their families—and look forward to the day when they can move to a bigger home in the fog belt.”63 The MNC’s study reaffirmed many elements of this picture. The introduction states that “the Mission might well be called a small City”; and it was a workers’ city.64 The study begins by asking, “Who lives there? Onethird of our [San Francisco’s] population lives there . . . a quarter of a million people. One quarter of a million laborers, workers . . . the backbone of our City. These are the people that make San Francisco go. They keep the works running” (ellipses original).65 All of the Mission’s inhabitants were laborers, in this formulation, and that category included the “SpanishAmerican” “new-comers.”66 The MNC’s recommendations for this workers’ city within a city were first of all to increase social services, fostering a stronger sense of community. With these services in place, the neighborhood would be in a better position to organize. Taking a “self-help approach,” the MNC would facilitate the creation of “a Greater Mission Citizens’ Council composed of interested citizens, existing and newly formed neighborhood councils and organizations, as well as representatives from service organizations.”67 In a process that the MNC described as self-directed “social engineering,” the Citizens’ Council would create a rehabilitation program for the neighborhood, a program that could “be divided into do-it-yourself projects that can be handled by business groups, service units and individuals.”68 The idea was very similar to the one that the MPA and Civic League had proposed in 1912, in which those groups mapped out “City Beautiful Districts,” then gave informal jurisdiction for each district to a number of community organizations.69 As with the Civic League in the 1912 scheme, the MNC would provide “professional and technical assistance” but would not itself devise specific plans.70 For the MNC, the idea was largely to forestall the possibility of a clearance-heavy urban renewal program driven by the SFRA. The MNC’s vision of the city stood in stark contrast to that of San Francisco’s downtown-based planning regime. In the latter vision, neighborhoods figured primarily as corridors for the circulation of goods, consumers, and office workers; it was a vision in which older, dense neighborhoods—neighborhoods that were mixed both in terms of land use and demographics—were inefficient, dark, and unhealthy. The MNC’s

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vision, by contrast, put neighborhood at the center. This vision portrayed density and diversity as sources of vibrancy, pointing toward a bright future for the workers’ city within a city, a future characterized by a familyfriendly, egalitarian urban culture. The contrast comes into focus when one compares the visual conventions employed by the MNC, with those issuing from the DCP, SFRA, the SFPHA, and other entities that constituted the new planning regime. In figure 9.2, the Department of City Planning’s image shows the existing dense city as an alienating, dark, childless maze, which it contrasts with a sunny, family-friendly, low-density future. By

Figure 9.2. Top: dense, dark urban maze contrasted with family friendly, sunny suburbs (“Progress in City Planning: A Report to the People of San Francisco,” San Francisco Department of City Planning, 1948); bottom: bright, sunny, family-friendly, and dense urban scene (Mission Neighborhood Centers pamphlet “Why,” Districts: Mission, 1960–63, 4/20, Christopher mayoral papers, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library).

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contrast, the MNC’s image combines elements of both visions, showing a sunny, family-friendly future in the dense city.

Conclusion In the 1930s the WPA, PWA, and USHA had sought to foster a social order where economic equality took precedence over individual prosperity. But by 1943, the WPA and PWA had been dissolved. Only the USHA remained, and the authority—along with its local partner, the SFHA—felt compelled to justify their programs in terms of profitability of land use rather than social equity. Governmental agencies were pursuing a vision of progress that required a radical rethinking of the very existence of neighborhoods, thinking not in terms of a laboring public but rather a motoring public and a shipping public. In this vision, the public was constituted at the scale of the city, and the city was a business. A neighborhood, then, figured as a subunit of the larger business. If it turned a profit, its future was assured; if not, then perhaps it needed to be retooled or even removed. Historically, San Francisco governmental agencies had been tolerant of African Americans, if not Asians. The same could not be said of the agencies founded in the immediate postwar period: the DCP and the SFRA, both of which viewed “non-white population” as a transparent index of blight, along with mixed land use, high tuberculosis rates, and other metrics. City agencies continued to regard Latinos as white, but that meant that they would be accommodated only insofar as they remained invisible, since nonwhite presence was by definition a detriment to the balance sheet. Within the Mission, however, the prevailing attitudes and aspirations were increasingly out of sync with these citywide norms. Rather than approach planning strictly from the perspective of the balance sheet, neighborhood institutions remained committed to a New Deal–inspired vision of social and economic equality. Mission-based merchants, unions, social service providers, and parish churches all began to racialize the growing Latino population—but also to welcome the newcomers. Workers were still the embodiment of the public in the Mission, just as they had been in the heyday of the BTC and the MPA. Only now neighborhood institutions began including ethnic minorities in the category of worker rather than thinking of them as interlopers or scabs. The story of how established Mission institutions and residents welcomed a Latino minority is surprising, considering that the literature on postwar U.S. urbanism has focused, in the main, on ethnic and racial polarization: white suburbs/black cities, white flight/urban decay.71 The meta-

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phor of white flight offers a convenient way to describe a large migration that occurred in the years following World War II, but it has also served to obscure many of the institutional and social relations that determined postwar life. Anglos were not simply fleeing the city, as a crowd flees an earthquake and a fire; rather, they were creating their own cities where they could establish their own policy priorities, tax regimes, and aesthetic environments.72 The white flight metaphor has also obscured the fact that many Anglos actually stayed in the city, where they too would soon engage in a new round of “state building”—this one at the scale of the neighborhood.

TEN

A “Salvable Neighborhood”: Urban Renewal, Model Cities, and the Rise of a Social Planning Regime Making the Mission revolves around a simple question: Who got to decide what would be built where? Concerning the earlier part of the twentieth century, the best way to answer that question is to look at who was most responsible for specific physical improvements. The neighborhood was not yet built out, and many projects were undertaken; those projects were guided by a relatively stable planning regime, led by the Mission Promotion Association (MPA). In the immediate postwar period, one can trace who was able to decide what would be built where by observing who was most responsible for freeway construction. Neighborhood-based planning was not dead, but it was dormant during this period, and another stable planning regime—centered on the interests of downtown—had supplanted the local power structure. By the 1960s, however, the story became more complex. The neighborhood was almost entirely built out and was under-resourced. One cannot simply excavate the history of built projects, nor sketch the biographies of entrenched planning regimes, for the simple reasons that little was built and no dominant planning regime emerged. So, to determine who held planning power during this period requires focusing more on failed planning initiatives, and on the debates that swirled around the question of who should be allowed to plan in the Mission when the opportunity next presented itself. Politics are always a feature of planning, but when little is actually built, and when power is hotly contested, politics necessarily loom larger than they might during a building boom that is guided by a relatively stable regime. In the 1960s, the social environment of San Francisco continued to transform itself at an astonishing pace. According to census data, the Mission was 11.6 percent “Hispanic” in 1950; 22.7 percent in 1960; and

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44.6 percent in 1970.1 In other words, the Latino population doubled each decade for the thirty-year period after World War II. The face of the neighborhood was changing, and these changes are nowhere more visible than in the photographic record. Before World War II, that extensive record provides scant evidence of Latino presence on the streets of the Mission, nostalgic tableaux notwithstanding (see fig. 7.3). By the mid-1950s, the diversity of the public realm was a simple fact of life. (See fig. 10.1.) In 1962 David Braaten, the Chronicle reporter who had written about the neighborhood, began his series of articles with a simple observation: “The Mission is a city of sunshine.”2 Braaten thus reaffirmed a commonsense un-

Figure 10.1. A 1958 photograph of Mission Street. News copy from San Francisco News-Call Bulletin: “Huge turnout of shoppers was reported by merchants along the Mission District Miracle Mile offering Dollar Day bargains yesterday. This scene on sidewalk crowded with men, women and children was typical.” San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, AAB-4712.

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derstanding that had prevailed in San Francisco since “the pell-mell building boom after the fire” of 1906—not only was the Mission the sunniest part of the city, it was indeed its own city altogether. In Braaten’s account, that city faced some challenges, but it also continued to thrive. The demographic changes had not been accompanied by widespread social unrest; they had only strengthened the cultural identity of the place: it was “polyglot,” “a place of many voices” that managed to maintain “a small-town cordiality in the stores and markets that isn’t so easily found downtown.”3 Economic and physical changes were also accelerating during this period. Downtown added upward of a million square feet of office space, as San Francisco consolidated its position as one the country’s leading centers of international commerce and banking, and of white-collar employment generally. In the Mission District these changes had many worrisome consequences. Industrial businesses continued to move away from the formerly no-lined area in the northeast of the neighborhood, leaving behind an increasingly derelict landscape. Schools stagnated, and crime rates soared. The housing stock declined in quality, as it increased in density. All of these changes raised the question of whether the SFRA needed to intervene in the Mission. The urban renewal program was now under way in San Francisco, and almost from the outset, it was clear that there were problems. One of the SFRA’s first projects was in the mostly African American Fillmore, also known as the Western Addition, an area that the HOLC had shaded red, and that the downtown planning regime had identified as blighted and as a drain on city resources. The area became the second-largest residential redevelopment project in the nation at the time; only Boston’s South End was larger.4 When James Baldwin famously described urban renewal as “negro removal,” he was talking about the Fillmore.5 More than 13,500 people were displaced, without any real provision for relocation. More than 1,280 acres were cleared, and the spectacular hole in the center of the city served as a visceral reminder of the SFRA’s failure and of its consequences for a working-class community. With all of this in mind, the Mission Merchants’ Association and the MNC thought it wise to initiate a neighborhood-based plan to address the Mission’s problems, rather than wait around for the area to be clear-cut. But because these organizations believed that BART was likely to trigger speculative displacement, they also believed that they had to harness the power of government if they were to have any hope of mitigating such powerful market forces. The neighborhood’s subsequent encounter with the city over urban renewal was surprising for several reasons. As it turned out, San

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Francisco’s postwar planning regime had never intended to clear the Mission, as decades of documentation reveal. Rather, city agencies—including the SFRA and even the downtown corporate interests—all identified the Mission as an area that was suitable for a rehabilitation rather than a clearance program. Once the Merchants and the MNC emerged to request that the municipal agencies engage in a collaborative planning exercise with the neighborhood, the city proved happy to accommodate them. Here was an opportunity for the city to demonstrate that it could work with a community, rather than only against it. That officials at these agencies demonstrated a receptivity to substantive citizen participation was due in no small part to some larger structural changes, particularly the intensification of the civil rights movement and the emergence of Great Society programs. These structural changes made it possible for new voices to emerge within city hall—a Human Rights Commission (HRC) and the Economic Opportunity Council (EOC)—voices that had standing to challenge the postwar planning regime. Considering how much influence these new voices would exercise, they might even be said to constitute a new social planning regime—one with the power to challenge the downtown-oriented regime. Just as the new social planning establishment was emerging, the Johnson administration announced another new Great Society program called Model Cities, largely as a response to the failures of urban renewal. Model Cities was to focus on rehabilitation and social programs, rather than only clearance, and was to include real and substantial citizen engagement. Together, all of these developments suggested that the Mission was in a position to preserve its social and physical fabric, while also addressing its challenges. But the opportunity was a tenuous one. The fourth and final part of Making the Mission tells the story of how neighborhood residents and institutions became motivated once again by the desire to nurture a “city within a city,” a self-reliant urban unit, one that could not only satisfy its own demand for commercial services but also plan for itself.6 To situate this story, it is necessary to begin with some background on the shifting urban context.

The City in the World, and the Neighborhood in the City The 1960s witnessed profound changes to the physical, sociopolitical, and economic landscape of cities around the country. Even as World War II had raged, a group of San Francisco’s largest banks and corporations began an effort to plan a new city, one designed for the needs of a new economy.7

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This new economy would rely less on the production and transportation of goods and more on the management of companies that were competing throughout the United States, the Pacific Rim, and the world. The new San Francisco would need fewer rails for boxcars and more freeways for commuters, fewer garment factories and more offices, less working-class housing and more middle- and upper-class housing. In the 1960s and 1970s, the transformation of San Francisco shifted into high gear: between 1960 and 1964, the city added 573,000 square feet of office space; between  1970  and 1974, it added 1,631,400 square feet of office space.8 Between 1958 and 1969, jobs in “service industries increased by 30%, with the most rapid growth in research, office services, accounting, [and] medical services.”9 Jobs in finance, insurance, and real estate increased by 37 percent during this period, while blue-collar jobs decreased by 13 percent.10 San Francisco’s Human Resources Development Center estimated that 8,900 blue-collar jobs were lost during the 1960s, as manufacturing and warehousing suburbanized. By “the mid-1970s, San Francisco was second only to New York City among U.S. cities as a center of international commerce and banking”; by 1971, it was second only to Washington, D.C., in terms of white-collar jobs as a percentage of the total labor market.11 These changes registered in the physical and social environment of the Mission District. Businesses continued moving away from the formerly no-lined area of the northeastern Mission, leaving many aging structures that had housed a range of “medium industry, including metal fabricators, contractors of all types, trucking, food processors, garment manufacturers, warehousing, building materials, and industrial suppliers.”12 Several abandoned breweries were a conspicuous presence in the northeast of the neighborhood, but according to the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, Mission Street was still the “largest center of consumer activity outside of the central business district.”13 The theaters, department stores, and furniture stores continued to do brisk business, but pawnshops and pornographic theaters were also opening on the street, to the dismay of the Mission Merchants Association and many Latino families.14 While Mission Street remained a vibrant commercial center, its clientele became increasingly local. The Corridor Study estimated that in 1967, 58 percent of Mission Street customers came from outside the neighborhood. But when BART construction began in 1969, that number was radically reduced.15 BART did initially hold out the possibility of transporting the neighborhood’s mostly semi- and unskilled workers to the new suburban manufacturing centers, but roundtrip fares were prohibitively high for most Mission workers.16 The expansion of white-collar work offered new pros-

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pects, including more opportunities for women, but most Mission residents were not able to take advantage.17 This period witnessed an increasing mismatch between the skill sets required by the new industries, on the one hand, and the language and vocational skills of Mission residents, on the other. Neighborhood groups also pointed to a lack of educational and training opportunities, and to the discriminatory practices of employers and unions.18 During this period, only 2.9 percent of the city’s civil servants were from the Mission.19 This figure described a profound change not only in employment patterns but also in the political influence of the Mission District. While no comparable statistic exists for 1910 to 1930, a much higher percentage of San Francisco’s civil servants must have come from the neighborhood, as Missionites then occupied the mayoralty and, at various moments, the presidency of a number of commissions, including city planning. Missionites also occupied an unknown but presumably large number of lower-level appointive positions. Neighborhood groups explained the fact that Mission residents no longer held even functionary positions in city government as a consequence of the discriminatory practices of civil service unions. Many also asserted that discrimination was not confined to civil service unions; it persisted in construction unions, too. The evidence on that front is mixed. White unionists were still heavily represented in the Mission, and Latinos had some progress to make. By 1969, San Francisco’s Equal Opportunity Employment Commission was reporting that of the sixty-five building trade unions it studied, Spanish-surname membership accounted for 6.8 percent of the total, while “Spanish-surname persons constituted 8.9% of the City’s population.”20 Only “3 of the 10 principal labor unions contain at least a proportionate number of Spanish-surname persons.”21 Though these figures demonstrated that Latinos did not have proportional representation, the gap was narrower than it was for other groups. Moreover, Latino workers now had their own unions, most prominently the Obreros, which would exert real influence in the labor market and in San Francisco politics generally. While Latinos did not have proportional representation within organized labor, their position was clearly improving. The same might be said about African Americans, but the statistics suggest that they had much further to go: only 5 percent of construction union members were “Black, while Blacks accounted for 14% of the total population.”22 If Spanish-surname membership were to increase 2.1 percent, Latinos would achieve parity within the construction unions, numerically speaking at least; for African Americans, the gap was 9 percent.

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During this period, the population of the Mission became more Latino. In 1950 the Spanish-surname population of the Mission was about 11 percent; by 1960 it was 23 percent, and by 1970 the figure was 45 percent.23 In 1970, non-Latino whites made up 36 percent of the Mission, while Asians made up 10 percent, blacks 5 percent, and “Others” 4 percent.24 Large areas of the neighborhood, like the northeastern corner and the central Mission, were more than 50 percent Latino by 1970.25 By 1971, the Mission would be “53% more densely populated than San Francisco as a whole,” and 70 percent of the landlords in the neighborhood were absentee.26 With rents in the Mission at about 78 percent of the citywide average in 1960, housing vacancies were quickly filled with immigrants from El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Mexico.27 By the early 1970s, the cultures of the newcomers began to “dominate” the neighborhood, “with theaters, restaurants, import stores, newspapers, radio programs, and a weekly television program to display various aspects of Latino cultures.”28 Throughout the 1960s, the Catholic parish church of St. Peter’s continued to expand its advocacy on behalf of workers and Latinos. Father Leo Ulgesic preached one of the first Spanish-language sermons at St. Peter’s in the mid-1960s; he recalled that immediately afterward he was “accosted by an irate Irish woman who reminded him, ‘This is an Irish parish.’ Ulgesic responded, ‘Not anymore, it isn’t.’“29 During this period the church created the Catholic Council for the Spanish Speaking, and in 1961 St. Peter’s joined the Cursillo movement, an international effort to train laypeople for Spanish-language ministry.30 But the church also began to expand beyond strictly ecclesiastical activities. In 1965, St. Peter’s helped to found the Organization for Business Economic and Community Advancement (OBECA)/Arriba Juntos (Upward Together), a Latino community service organization with offices in the old Labor Temple.31 OBECA/Arriba Juntos was funded by the Catholic Charities Committee and the United Bay Area Crusade, which also funded the Mission Neighborhood Centers (MNC). Additional funding came from federal agencies: the Department of Labor and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.32 The St. Peter’s– sponsored OBECA/Arriba Juntos would become a key actor in the politics and planning of the Mission. The available evidence suggests that most longtime Mission residents welcomed the Latino newcomers. A 1964 article in the Examiner painted a sanguine picture of an honest, hardworking people who “have adjusted remarkably well” to their new life in the Mission. The piece quoted two separate Anglo merchants calling the Latinos “wonderful people”; and while it identified the newcomers as industrious laborers, the piece did not suggest

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that they were competing for jobs with Anglo citizens. The only troubling social problem identified in the article was a perceived trend wherein the loose morals of teenage Americans was beginning to “rub off” on young Latinos.33 There is no source base that speaks directly to the question of how San Francisco lenders and realtors regarded Latinos during this period, but it is clear that the downtown planning regime continued to regard them as white. This would change dramatically by the end of the 1960s, but as late as 1961, SPUR described the Mission as one of the city’s whitest neighborhoods, in spite of the fact that census data showed that large portions of the neighborhood were close to 50 percent Latino.34 These systematic oversights are likely explained, at least in part, by the logics of the real estate market: If realtors and lenders designated an area as having an inharmonious racial concentration, they diminished their business opportunities in that area; if planners identified an area as nonwhite, they diminished the tax base. While this practice rendered Latinos invisible as Latinos, it also provided them a measure of shelter from the more overtly racist real estate practices that Asians and African Americans endured. Right across the bay, the story was very different for Latinos. In Oakland, racial covenants barring Mexicans had been typical before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that they violated the Fourteenth Amendment in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948). But racist practices continued to flourish. A Mexican woman named Maria Martinez recalled arriving in the city’s Fruitvale district in 1957 to find signs in storefronts reading, “Dogs and Mexicans Not Allowed” and “Blacks and Mexicans Not Allowed.”35 In Los Angeles and Chicago, Mexicans had occupied the lowest rung of the racial ladder since at least the 1930s.36 Even though the Mission did not experience the kind of racial strife that characterized many other urban neighborhoods around the country in the early 1960s, the neighborhood was not altogether healthy. The physical presence of labor continued to diminish. The Building Trades Temple had stood at Guerrero and Fourteenth Streets since 1908, when the BTCcontrolled Union Labor Party dominated not only industrial relations, but also city government. But after this symbol of labor’s political ascendancy burned in 1959, the building was purchased by a development company called Security Builders, who replaced it with an apartment building containing forty-two units of market-rate housing.37 When it came to questions relating to the social and physical space of the neighborhood, the Obreros were now the Mission’s most influential building-trades union.38 The San Francisco Labor Council (SFLC) also continued to struggle. As industry moved away, so too did the unions that had once occupied the

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Labor Temple that had stood at Sixteenth and Capp Streets since 1914, forcing the SFLC to take out a series of loans for upkeep. At least fifty-five unions had held meetings in the Temple in the prewar period; now only a handful did. By the 1960s, the SFLC began renting space to Latino community organizations like OBECA/Arriba Juntos.39 As the old SFLC headquarters transitioned into a community center, residents stopped referring to it as the “Temple” and began calling it the “Redstone Building.” Community service space was in increasing demand all over the neighborhood. By the end of the 1960s, the National Guard used only about one-fourth of the armory’s 269,000 square feet, and that mainly on weekends; many neighborhood groups fought (unsuccessfully) to have the armory converted to a community center.40 Social services were in high demand because physical and social conditions were deteriorating.41 A new local paper called the New Mission/Nueva Misión regularly issued reports—like the 1968 “Facts on Glue Sniffing”— about the neighborhood’s troubles, particularly among young people.42 Mike Miller, an organizer who would be at the heart of the Mission’s 1960s mobilization, wrote that the “neighborhood had its full share of problems: city services were inadequate; the quality of the schools was poor; rents were beginning to skyrocket; unemployment was high, especially among teenagers and young adults; many people, including the elderly, were fearful to leave their homes—because of the local crime rate; large families were in desperate need of child-care services; health care was inadequate.”43 Only one new school had been built in the Mission since 1935.44 The SFRA reported that 23 percent of the housing in the Mission lacked “adequate plumbing.”45 All of these conditions raised the question of whether urban renewal was in order for the neighborhood. Before describing how those discussions unfolded, it is useful to review some of the basic facts about the program, at both the federal and the local levels.

Urban Renewal, Class, and Race The nationwide urban renewal program effectively began when the United States Congress passed the Housing Act of 1949. The stated aim of the act was to realize “as soon as feasible the goal of a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family.”46 Part of the aim was also to expand and modernize existing downtowns, removing aging industrial and residential fabric to accommodate the spatial requirements of the service sector—a sector that lawmakers predicted would soon com-

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pose a much larger proportion of the economy. To accomplish these aims, Title  I of the act provided federal funding for a program of “slum clearance,” expanding and streamlining powers of eminent domain for municipalities. Title II allocated funding to create 810,000 units of public housing nationwide, only about 370,000 of which were actually created by 1964.47 The 1954 Housing Act added provisions for the rehabilitation of existing structures to the program; the 1965 Housing and Urban Development Act added rent supplements for low-income tenants. In 1966, the federal government created the Model Cities program, which was separate from, but similar to, urban renewal. While urban renewal might be undertaken in any kind of urban area deemed blighted, Model Cities was directed toward well-organized low-income communities, and emphasized rehabilitation and social services over clearance. In 1973 Model Cities effectively ended, and urban renewal severely curtailed, when the Nixon administration put a moratorium on all federal housing and community development assistance as part of his “New Federalism” agenda.48 Led by the San Francisco Planning and Housing Association (SFPHA), the downtown planning regime began anticipating the disbursement of federal money for renewal at least as early as 1941. It was instrumental in creating San Francisco’s Redevelopment Agency (the SFRA) in 1948, before the passage of the federal Housing Act. To qualify for Title I monies, rehabilitation funds, or rent supplements, a city was required to declare an area as “blighted”; criteria for assessing blight were left to local governments. Again, San Francisco’s postwar planning regime defined a blighted area as one that cost more in services than it generated in tax revenue.49 More finegrained measures included nonwhite population, average rental prices, average income, homeownership rates, condition of structures, and—most importantly—mixed use.50 In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the SFRA began its first three projects: Diamond Heights, a sparsely populated hilly area south of Twin Peaks and west of the Mission; the Golden Gateway, the area of the produce market between the financial district and the Embarcadero that was operated mostly by Italian residents of North Beach; and the Western Addition, the primarily African American neighborhood that the SFPHA had surveyed in its 1947 “Blight and Taxes” pamphlet. In Diamond Heights, the redevelopment agency declared 325 acres of mostly unimproved land blighted. Together, the city and the state already owned more than half of that land, so extensive condemnations were not necessary. The land was home to “only 374 people and 158 houses, along with a few stables, two abandoned quarries, and a truck storage yard. The agency hoped to be able to move

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these buildings but ultimately seventy structures were retained and rehabilitated.”51 Building began in 1956, and the project would eventually create 2,100 units of housing, almost 500 of which were affordable. This early success story is typically overlooked in the historiography, as scholars have understandably focused their attention on the projects that generated more controversy. The SFRA easily overcame the community resistance it met in the Golden Gateway project.52 But the much larger Western Addition project—the second-largest residential redevelopment project in the nation at the time—would become a quagmire for the agency.53 In the 1940s and 1950s, the Western Addition was a working-class African American neighborhood with a mostly Victorian housing stock that was not in good repair. But the Fillmore, as the neighborhood was more commonly known among residents, also hosted a thriving entertainment district. Its many jazz clubs attracted performers like Billie Holiday, Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane, among many other famous musicians, earning the Fillmore the nickname “Harlem of the West.” With little regard for the neighborhood’s cultural significance, the SFRA divided the Western Addition into two project areas, known as A-1 and A-2, which together comprised about 1,280 acres, or more than one hundred blocks covering two square miles of contiguous land. The vast majority of the structures within that area were destroyed, including all of the jazz clubs and about 3,120 housing units. More than 13,500 people were displaced, but only a fraction of them received new accommodations. Though solid data are not available, research reports that many of the displaced families moved to the East Bay or to cities south of San Francisco. Those who did receive new accommodations were not able to move in for many years after the initial displacement; when they did return, they paid much higher rents.54 In 1969, the city would report that the SFRA had destroyed more than 6,000 total housing units throughout its redevelopment areas, while it only created 662 publicly aided units.55 The leveling of the Western Addition prompted many observers to charge that the SFRA was targeting poor minority neighborhoods. In 1963, the celebrated author James Baldwin received a well-publicized tour of San Francisco. Driving through the project area, his African American guide pointed out a section of the Western Addition, saying that it was part of the redevelopment: “You say redevelopment meaning what?” Baldwin asked. “Meaning removing Negroes,” his guide responded. “That’s what I thought you meant,” Baldwin replied.56

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Though the SFRA finessed data to counter these claims, the charge was difficult to deflect in the face of the spectacle of the “bombed-out” area, an area that had been a black neighborhood in the mental maps of San Franciscans.57 Regardless of what the SFRA said it was doing, the hole in the ground seemed to speak for itself. The autocratic bearing and insensitive comments of the agency’s director, Justin Herman, did not help matters for the SFRA. In one public meeting, when discussing the elderly white pensioners who had lived for decades in another SFRA survey area, known as Yerba Buena, Herman declared, “This land is too valuable to permit poor people to park on it.”58 It was in part remarks like this led a Western Addition organizer named Hannibal Williams to say, “We didn’t know who the devil was, but we knew who Justin Herman was.”59 The fact that federal law required “maximum feasible participation” from the community in the formulation of renewal plans did little to quell criticism, because the law did not explicitly define what constituted citizen participation.60 The San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal Association (SPUR) had provided the citizen input component for all of the SFRA’s early plans, and SPUR was beholden to the Blyth-Zellerbach (B-Z) Committee, a group of the city’s most powerful downtown business leaders. In 1966, SPUR issued a publication, titled “Prologue for Action,” which laid out the rationale for redeveloping the working-class Yerba Buena area in the South of Market: If San Francisco decides to compete effectively with other cities for new “clean” industries and new corporate power, its population will move closer to standard white Anglo-Saxon Protestant characteristics. As automation increases, the need of unskilled labor will decrease. Economically and socially, the population will tend to range from lower middle class through lower upper class. . . . Selection of a population’s composition might be undemocratic. Influence on it, however, is legal and desirable for the health of the city.61

So an organization with a frankly racist and self-described “undemocratic” planning agenda had provided “maximum feasible participation” on behalf of poor blacks in the Western Addition and poor whites in the Yerba Buena.62 Many began to observe that this was a farce. Once it became clear that the SFRA was going to face resistance in the Western Addition, the agency did begin to make promises to involve neighborhood residents and to focus on rehabilitation. One historian has char-

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acterized these as “promises meant to be broken.”63 Indeed the SFRA’s citizen participation efforts did little to change the course of planning in the Fillmore. The accomplishments of groups like the Western Addition Community Organization (WACO) were realized more fully in the Mission, insofar as they established a principle: the postwar planning regime could not expect to simply roll over a neighborhood without a fight.

A “Salvable Neighborhood”: The Postwar Planning Regime, Urban Renewal, and the Mission In spite of its well-deserved reputation for racism and classism, the SFRA was another San Francisco institution that did not exhibit openly racist attitudes toward Mission Latinos. The SFRA’s earliest plan for the neighborhood would most certainly have resulted in the displacement of many Latino residents through rising property values, if not through clearance, but the agency continued the local real estate practice of largely overlooking the Latino presence, a practice that was never challenged during the 1950s. In fact, San Francisco’s postwar planning regime had always viewed the Mission through a different lens than it viewed the Fillmore. The SFRA and other city agencies had been surveying the Mission for decades, imagining a rehabilitation rather than a clearance program. The first statement on the neighborhood came in 1948, with the “Report on Conditions Indicative of Blight and Redevelopment Policies,” a supplement to the Master Plan. The report focused on the Mission, Western Addition, Chinatown, and South of Market, asserting that drastic measures were called for in all of those neighborhoods except the Mission: Some of the worst housing in the City and the greatest need for redevelopment exists in Chinatown. . . . The largest single area of blight in San Francisco is the Western Addition  .  .  . Here are opportunities for the creation of new properties which would give clean, modern housing to hundreds of families. . . . The housing areas South of Market must be attacked.64

However, the Mission was identified only as a “spotty area of blight,” the “decline” of which might be “arrested” through “redevelopment or the comprehensive rehabilitation of certain key areas.”65 The same four neighborhoods appeared again in a 1955 report, focusing on the “Classification of Areas for Urban Renewal.” As with the previous report, clearance was recommended for the other three neighbor-

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hoods, which were described as “nonsalvable slums.”66 However, this document did not classify the Mission as blighted, noting only that it “should be considered susceptible to blight.”67 The document stated more explicitly than the 1948 survey that conditions in the Mission—a “salvable” neighborhood—called for rehabilitation.68 In the SFRA’s “Rapid Transit Corridor Study” from 1962 and 1963, the agency affirmed its longstanding position on the Mission: “Because of the general quality of the Corridor area, emphasis will be on massive retention rather than clearance of structures.”69 At a regular SFRA meeting on February 8, 1966, Norman Murdoch, the chief of the Planning and Architecture Division and the person charged with carrying out the Rapid Transit Corridor Study, stated: The emphasis of the proposal is on neighborhood improvement designed primarily to meet the needs of the current residents. Rehabilitation is the major treatment recommended, with spot clearance where required. New parks and playgrounds are proposed. . . . Street tree planting, off-street parking, new community facilities, and underground utilities are proposed to make the community more liveable and attractive.70

Economists hired by the Rapid Transit Corridor Study predicted that by 1975 market forces would remove nearly 5,000 of the existing housing units in the Mission Street Area, or an average of 500 units demolished each year. In their place would be built 7,000 to 7,500 higher-density, higherpriced rental units. These numbers were very high, and the report contained little discussion of how the economists arrived at these figures, which raised the question of whether the SFRA was not overestimating in order to justify an intervention. The study concluded that “only through the renewal process can the use of the land be removed from this normal influence of the marketplace and directed to social objectives such as housing that corresponds with the financial capacities of the residents of the area.”71 While it may be that the SFRA exaggerated data, it is nonetheless the case that the agency consistently argued for rehabilitation rather than clearance of the Mission. Since 1948, the SFRA had insisted that the Western Addition and Yerba Buena must be cleared, but maintained that the Mission must be saved.72 So while many feared that the agency’s emphasis on rehabilitation was disingenuous—a cover for a clearance plan—decades of SFRA and DCP reports suggested otherwise. After all, the SFRA had done exactly what it always said it would do in the Western Addition and Yerba Buena, the provision of replacement housing notwithstanding. A 1962

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article in the Chronicle put it very simply: “The Mission isn’t run down enough to get the attention of redevelopment officials.”73 The only moment when anyone suggested that a substantial portion of the Mission should be cleared came in a 1965 report by an external consultant named Arthur D. Little. The report recommended that a vast area come under a general renewal program that would seek to completely remake San Francisco—“its physical face, its economic life, its social patterns.” The plan suggested that “every area of San Francisco needs renewal treatment: In some places a face-lifting, in others tearing down and starting from scratch.”74 The only two areas where the report recommended that “significant tearing down and rebuilding” needed to happen were the Mission and the northern waterfront. But these recommendations were completely out of sync with the thinking of the local planning establishment in 1965, which wanted to clear South of Market but to preserve the Mission. None of the report’s recommendations were adopted. Debates and organizational shifts internal to the municipal government also strongly suggest that the city viewed the Mission through a different lens. Mayor George Christopher was an ardent supporter of downtown’s transportation agenda, and he did much to reinvigorate the SFRA when he brought in Justin Herman in 1959; but he was also a former small businessman (a dairy owner) who had always felt ambivalent about the enterprise of dispossessing other small businesspeople and ordinary homeowners of their property and the attendant large-scale clearances.75 Judging by his correspondence, Christopher appears to have listened closely to a critique that, in practice, the urban renewal program exhibited racial bias.76 He also appears to have been particularly responsive to neighborhoodbased groups like merchants’ associations, ethnic social clubs, and unionaffiliated charities—many based in the Mission—and he seems to have accepted invitations to attend and even speak at neighborhood groups’ events more often than San Francisco’s other postwar mayors.77 The mayor’s attention to neighborhoods made his administration remarkably prescient about the community resistance that urban renewal would later face. Only a few years into the program, in 1956, San Francisco’s director of city planning, Paul Opperman, wrote to the federal Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA) to ask for funding to conduct organizational studies of neighborhoods, with the end goal of ensuring effective citizen participation. Opperman reasoned that planners had no trouble identifying the “formal leadership” of neighborhoods; one need only look to the traditional neighborhood-based organizations: “improve-

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ment clubs, trade associations, churches, local chamber groups, and citizen organizations.” However, there also existed “informal leadership”: [These are] citizens who can influence others, but who do not necessarily possess formal group membership. To secure a sound basis for community participation both kinds of leaders should be used to the fullest extent in all phases of an urban renewal program. Dependence on formal groups’ leaders is not enough, and could possibly cause the failure of any attempt to secure voluntary participation in cleaning up housing conditions in a particular area.78

Informal neighborhood leaders needed to be identified and involved in the planning process from the outset if any given urban renewal plan was to succeed. It was for the purpose of identifying such leaders that San Francisco applied for federal funding to conduct a study.79 The request was denied, so it is impossible to know whether the proposed study would have helped the SFRA overcome the resistance it would later meet in the Mission. But, as we shall see, the battle over redevelopment in the District would bear a striking resemblance to the scenario that Opperman outlined: the formal leadership of the neighborhood was well apprised of the planning that was being done on its behalf; but theretofore silent and even marginal elements from the neighborhood would organize and assume leadership in a way that the city was not prepared for. In the meantime, the Christopher administration continued to believe that the dominance of downtown needed to be tempered, and continued to make what appear to be good-faith efforts to involve neighborhoods. In 1962, San Francisco applied for and received HHFA funding to create a citywide Community Renewal Plan to help coordinate the city’s renewal projects.80 Key to the plan would be the participation of a citizens’ advisory council. In the first draft of the application, the mayor’s staff listed primarily downtown-based entities to serve on the citizens’ advisory group, but the mayor insisted that “more neighborhood councils and improvement clubs,” as well as more “community service and minority group representatives,” be added.81 The revised list included the Mission Merchants’ Association; the Community Service Organization (CSO), a statewide social service group representing Spanish speakers; and the Greater Mission Neighborhood Council (also known as the Greater Mission Citizens’ Council), created by the Mission Neighborhood Centers (MNC).82 By the time the Community Renewal Plan was being discussed, the MNC had already been communicating with the mayor’s office, the SFRA,

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and the DCP for years. In 1961, officials from the organization wrote to Christopher, copying Justin Herman, to complain that the urban renewal program to date had always put physical planning before citizen participation—major planning decisions were already made and then citizens were informed—and to insist that the order had to be reversed in the Mission. Leaders of the MNC promoted their idea of a community-led rehabilitation plan, “in which simple conservation procedures can recapture it [the neighborhood] for the future,” thus avoiding a need for “total redevelopment.”83 City agencies responded very favorably to these suggestions. The SFHA provided technical assistance to the organization as it began the process of planning for more senior housing.84 High-ranking staff from the mayor’s office, the planning department, and public works regularly attended the Centers’ meetings.85 Even Herman apparently regarded the MNC as a legitimate representative of the neighborhood. In one telling exchange, Herman responded to a resolution from the Mission-based Operating Engineers Local Union 3 calling for a renewal plan in the neighborhood. Copying the MNC, Herman told the local that their union was the only entity calling for redevelopment, and that “there is no indication of a strong community support for such an undertaking. Without such support, a renewal project is not likely to succeed.”86 When supervisor Harold Dobbs asked Herman about the possibility of a renewal project in the Mission, Herman responded in much the same way—that an effort to apply the SFRA’s techniques and resources “under a clearance concept is not workable.” The only way it could succeed was to preserve as much as possible.87 However, Dobbs kept after him. If clearance was not the solution, then why not rehabilitation? At Dobbs’s urging, in 1963 Herman would propose a “General Neighborhood Renewal Project” for a 3,300-acre area extending the length of Market Street and including most of the downtown financial district, part of the Civic Center, all of South of Market, and the vast majority of the Mission. Herman was clear, though, that the “entire area would not be redeveloped, and very little of it would be bulldozed. ‘Politically,’ said Herman, ‘that would be a mistake, practically it would be foolish, and financially it would be impossible.’”88 After the early failures of the urban renewal program across the nation, the federal HHFA was becoming more flexible about possible strategies. The advantage of what Herman called “the neighborhood approach” was “that it permits ‘comprehensive, over-all planning of a large area; the government is more lenient in its credits for civic improvements such as rapid transit, and it does not require the entire study to be plastered with a ‘blight’ label.’”89 This rehabilitation-focused approach had already suc-

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ceeded in some projects in Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, New York, Boston, and just across the bay in Oakland.

Community-Driven Renewal Herman’s statements highlight one of the factors that distinguished the Mission from the areas where urban renewal projects were already under way. San Francisco’s postwar planning regime had never wanted to level the Mission in the first place, and officials in the SFRA and in municipal agencies were coming to understand that urban renewal could no longer proceed as it had. Almost from the outset of the program, there was evidence that at least some elements of San Francisco’s political class had a definite limit in their appetite for clearance. In 1959, the Examiner ran an article reporting, “with lively hope and warm support,” that the SFRA would also be undertaking conservation and rehabilitation programs, limiting the use of the “tremendously expensive and agonizingly slow . . . remedy called redevelopment.”90 In 1961, Christopher wrote directly to President Kennedy to say that the urban renewal program needed more flexibility, in general, and more funds for relocation, in particular.91 In 1963, the city’s Community Renewal Program commissioned a report that found that the SFRA’s current methods, especially with respect to the relocation of displaced residents, were in need of reform.92 Protests were mounting in the Western Addition, and the SFRA was gaining a reputation as an agency run amok. Herman soldiered on, but in an increasingly defensive posture. In 1964, he wrote the HHFA to say that he felt it would be a mistake to submit plans for the Yerba Buena redevelopment area to “minority leaders,” because they had “taken a militant stand in opposition to the redevelopment of Western Addition” and were now likely to oppose anything the SFRA put forward.93 Other city agencies had already begun collaborating with the MNC on a neighborhood-driven rehabilitation plan, and it is possible that no one would have seriously entertained a formal SFRA plan but for several factors that coalesced in the early 1960s. The most important of these was the approval, in 1962, of a $792 million bond issue for BART.94 With two stations planned along Mission Street, all observers assumed that the neighborhood was about to undergo significant change “with or without” an urban renewal plan.95 Also significant was the fact that the housing authority (the SFHA) had begun discussing the possibility of investing $9 million in lowrent housing in the Mission, a proposal that worried local homeowners and merchants for the same reason that the public housing of the 1940s

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worried them.96 So while the SFHA might depress land values and bring a lower-status clientele to the neighborhood, the new BART stations might trigger a speculative boom that would drive out small merchants along Mission Street.97 In this context, local homeowners and merchants began to see a Redevelopment Agency plan as a possible means to chart a middle course between government intrusion, on one side, and the ill effects of an unregulated land market, on the other—that is, of course, provided the neighborhood could control the Redevelopment Agency. The risk seemed worth it. In 1962 a group representing the Mission Merchants’ Association requested a study. In a letter to the Board of Supervisors, the group stated, “It is not our intention to ask for a ‘Slum Clearance Program’ as that term is used in redevelopment law and procedure, but rather that you request the Redevelopment Agency to study a program of revitalization and of corrective development.”98 With the Merchants having taken the first step, the MNC agreed to request a study, with a number of provisos: that a serious study be undertaken before any planning be done; that the study be oriented toward rehabilitation, rather than redevelopment; that any city agencies work in “partnership” with representative neighborhood groups; that “every possible step should be taken to avoid any substantial dislocation of residents who prefer to live in the Mission District”; that the study “recognize the many ethnic backgrounds among the residents of the Mission District”; that it “recognize the history of the Mission District and the desirability of maintaining in its places of history and traditional beauty”; that it “include ways to strengthen business in the Mission”; and—a quality-of-life concern—that it “consider the adequacy in the Mission District of those things that make neighborhoods pleasant to live in, such as well lighted streets, adequate transportation, well maintained parks, good schools, branch libraries and health centers.”99 The MNC facilitated the creation of the Greater Mission Citizens’ Council, with significant representation from the Mission Merchants and the improvement clubs, in order to communicate with area residents. The Merchants and the MNC also formed the Mission District Renewal Commission to do preliminary studies; one of the commission’s first moves was to retain the services of a design firm called Okamoto/Liskamm.100 With substantial support from the neighborhood, the mayor’s office began to seriously consider a project in the Mission. Internal correspondence makes clear that city agencies viewed the Mission as a test case. After having heard from the Mission Merchants, the mayor’s executive assistant on rede-

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velopment, Irwin Mussen, wrote that the project would focus “on rehabilitation of existing structures [with] as little clearance as possible”: However . . . San Francisco has never engaged in a real rehabilitation project under urban renewal, and it must be recognized that such activities would require an extraordinary amount of cooperation with all property owners and even tenants in and around the area. Mr. Keil and his group [the Merchants] seem to be doing a very good job in keeping all parties informed. I told him that in my opinion it is necessary, not only to inform, but to actually involve all interested groups if such an undertaking is to be successful. National experience proves that rehabilitation efforts require a great deal of voluntary cooperation on the part of residents and owners in an area. Because, unlike clearance and redevelopment, they will remain and be actively involved in the rehabilitation.101

After a meeting in Keil’s office with Mussen, Herman, and representatives from the Mission, downtown, and the city planning department, the mayor and the Board of Supervisors expressed increasing confidence that such a program could work.102 This meeting also marked a moment when a distinct shift in municipal discourse about urban renewal in the Mission could be detected. From that meeting on, all governmental agencies stopped talking about “urban renewal” and “redevelopment” and began using language like “rehabilitation,” “rehabilitation-renewal,” and “social and physical planning.”103 The supervisors’ 1963 resolution, requesting an SFRA study of the Mission, stated that the resulting program would be oriented toward “the revitalization” of the neighborhood.104 Because a rehabilitation-renewal program would clearly require significant citizen involvement, and because that involvement would be time-consuming, the Mission project did not race ahead into the planning stage.

The Rise of the Social Planning Regime In 1964 Christopher left office, ending a line of Republican mayors that stretched back to Rolph’s election in 1912 and beginning, with John “Jack” Shelley, a line of Democratic mayors that continues to the time of this writing. But though the two mayors were of different political stripes, Shelley did not alter course on urban renewal, retaining much of Christopher’s staff, notably Mussen, the executive assistant on redevelopment. A Mission District native, Shelley came out of a labor tradition, having served as the president of the SFLC. Residents in urban renewal project and study areas

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had reason to hope that the new mayor would work to humanize the urban renewal program. In his inaugural address, Shelley announced that he planned to approach urban renewal with a “heart as well as a bulldozer.”105 During his first year in office, he established an advisory Human Rights Commission (HRC), a municipal nonprofit corporation to provide analysis and counsel on matters of public policy. The commission was appointed by the mayor and was concerned, first and foremost, with confronting discrimination against disadvantaged groups and with providing equal opportunity for those groups.106 The storm of protest emanating from the Western Addition played no small role in demonstrating the need for such a commission, and the HRC included an Urban Renewal Committee and a Neighborhood Committee that was dedicated to aiding “in the achievement of full participation of minorities in the neighborhood and civic life of the city and county.”107 Though its role was only advisory when it was created in 1964, once nondiscrimination clauses were added to all city contracts in 1966, the HRC was empowered to enforce those clauses.108 Also in 1964 the federal government passed the Economic Opportunity Act, allowing San Francisco to establish an Economic Opportunity Council (EOC) to “review, evaluate and make determinations on any and all poverty-related Federal Spending Programs.”109 The EOC was not only an oversight body; it was the entity empowered to initiate local programs with War on Poverty funds, programs addressing issues like community development, housing, employment, and education. The EOC was particularly concerned with ensuring the “maximum feasible participation” of residents living in target areas: Hunters Point, the Western Addition, Chinatown, and the Mission.110 Each of these neighborhoods established area boards, like the Mission Area Community Action Board, Inc. (MACABI). Members of the area boards were chosen by residents of the neighborhoods, through a “democratic election process” to be determined by each area.111 To stand for election to the Mission board, candidates had to be residents of the area and had to qualify as poor (defined as earning no more than $4,000 per family in annual income). According to the San Francisco EOC, the Mission’s maximum income requirement was “unique in San Francisco and the entire nation.”112 The larger EOC had forty-seven directors—twenty-three appointed by the mayor and twenty-four chosen by the area boards, thus ensuring majority representation by residents of the target areas.113 While the EOC was incorporated to oversee War on Poverty funds, it was vocal and influential in a range of other policy debates, including those surrounding urban renewal. The very existence of entities like HRC, MACABI, and the larger EOC

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meant that San Francisco’s postwar planning regime now had to contend with countervailing voices not only from the community, but now also from within the municipal government. These new voices had the ear of the mayor and members of the Board of Supervisors, as well as senior staff in the planning department, the housing authority, and other city agencies. Collectively, these new entities would soon exert considerable influence on the official agendas for parts of the city that the EOC identified as poverty areas. If we think of a regime as a stable coalition with sufficient access to institutional resources to wield substantial and sustained influence on governing decisions, then collectively San Francisco’s newest organizations might be said to constitute an emerging social planning regime.114 In 1964 the federal government awarded the city a quarter-milliondollar grant to study the possibility of establishing an urban renewal project area, and the influence of the new social planning regime was apparent from the outset.115 Because it was intended to coordinate with BART, the survey was folded into the larger Rapid Transit Corridor Study, to be conducted jointly by the redevelopment agency and the planning department. The first order of business, however, was the Mission. Consulting with the HRC, Corridor team staff engaged in considerable outreach in the neighborhood.116 As described by T. J. Kent—the mayor’s coordinator of Housing, Planning, and Development—the Corridor staff published a weekly newsletter and conducted “weekly meetings with merchants and businessmen from the area. Numerous meetings are held for the benefit of improvement associations and other neighborhood associations. A special effort is made to reach the Spanish speaking population of the area.”117 This effort consisted mostly of hiring some bilingual staff and translating some printed documents like resolutions from the Board of Supervisors.118 Even though Kent viewed the extensive outreach—with hundreds of meetings—as a model for citizen participation, in early 1966 he did express some reservations about how effective the special effort to reach Latinos had been: “This attempt at wide scale citizen participation reached only those active neighborhood groups, merchants and homeowners. Remembering that only 14% of the people in the inner Mission are homeowners, the conclusion follows that most renters, and most of the Spanish speaking population remain apolitical, ignorant of the Corridor Study and its implications for their neighborhood.”119 Even though elements in municipal government worried that the growing Latino population had not been sufficiently involved, the study moved forward, finding, as predicted, that the Mission was essentially a sound neighborhood that should be considered susceptible to blight. The study re-

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affirmed that a “bulldozer-type operation” was not needed in the Mission, and that a “rehabilitation-renewal” scheme, focusing on social as well as physical planning, was the appropriate course.120 The study also affirmed the view that without some intervention, the coming of BART would trigger speculation that would displace many middle- and lower-income Missionites, and that an SFRA plan was the best means of ensuring that current residents would be able to stay.121 In February 1966, the SFRA and DCP published the preliminary urban design study, authored by the firm of Okamoto/Liskamm (the firm that was initially hired by the MNC and the Mission Merchants neighborhood groups). In May the agencies took the first steps toward making an application to the federal government for funding to move beyond the study phase and into the planning phase. In order to fully understand the fate of the preliminary plan, it is crucial to understand a concurrent set of debates, leading up to the passage of the Demonstration Cities Act of 1966—the act that established the Model Cities Program.

A Cover for Clearance? Model Cities, Round One In January 1966, HUD sent information packets to city halls around the country, titled “Questions and Answers to Explain the Demonstration Cities Act of 1966.” The packet made clear that President Johnson’s proposed legislation was in part an attempt to rectify some of the problems that American cities had experienced with the urban renewal program.122 The new program would seek to arrest blight in “slums,” but must also add to the stock of low- and moderate-priced housing, increase employment and educational opportunities, and improve social services. HUD required that any plan developed under the program be formulated with extensive citizen participation—and must “satisfactorily” relocate anyone displaced.123 In other words, any planning must focus on social as well as physical dynamics of the city. HUD also made clear that Model Cities was intended as a piece of President Johnson’s “Creative Federalism” approach, which emphasized that local problems required local solutions. The federal government could require certain outcomes and fund the efforts, but it should not dictate means, beyond insisting on citizen participation.124 In February 1966, Shelley was one of a handful of mayors whom HUD called to Washington, D.C., to review the proposed legislation.125 Upon his return, Shelley mounted a vigorous campaign to prepare an application for San Francisco that would be ready the moment the legislation passed, which he assumed would be in the summer. Shelley assembled an advisory

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committee that included the usual suspects—all relevant municipal entities, as well as representatives from labor and downtown, but also representatives from the new social planning regime.126 In fact, the list demonstrated that the social planning regime was expanding. In addition to the HRC and the EOC, it also included representatives from the NAACP, the Urban League, and the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA).127 The latter organization was represented by Herman Gallegos, who would soon play a key role in the Mission. After some jostling among various factions to administer the program—particularly between the SFRA and the EOC—it was quickly decided that a new nonprofit corporation would be established to manage Demonstration Cities.128 The next big question was where. The Mission District was a natural candidate, but the SFRA already had a plan in the works, one that was actually being formulated according to the same principles set forth in the proposed legislation: increased citizen participation and a focus on social as well as physical planning.129 In fact, Kent felt that the Mission effort to date would serve as a model for how to run the new program, stating that the “experience gained in this cooperative effort [in the Mission] can, we feel, be used to a great advantage in the City Demonstration Program.”130 So the Mission was spoken for by another program. Hunters Point was the other logical candidate. Along with the Western Addition, this was a poor area that housed many African Americans who had migrated from the South to work in the shipbuilding and munitions industries during World War II. Unlike the Western Addition, however, the SFRA had only a comparatively modest program in the works for Hunters Point, focusing mostly on the clearance of dilapidated wartime structures.131 The advisory committee settled upon Hunters Point, then set about a task that might very well have been impossible. If San Francisco’s application was to be ready when the act passed in the summer of 1966, or at least by the May 1967 deadline set by HUD, then the city had only a few months to identify a neighborhood organization that all area residents agreed was representative—and that was interested in participating in Model Cities.132 As senior planner M. F. Groat put it, the “first and major task” was for “the professional, the representatives of the public ‘establishment’ and the residents of the area to embark on a dialogue that will lead to self-determination”; it was a task Groat believed to be “painful and inefficient, time consuming and frustrating,” though ultimately worthwhile.133 So not only did the city need to identify a representative neighborhood group that was amenable to the Model Cities program; it also needed to forge a new relationship with that group, wherein the city’s professional

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staff would “be a part of rather than apart from the community organization.”134 But given the time available, was it possible to take any meaningful steps toward this novel planning structure? The Demonstration Cities Act finally passed in October 1966, and HUD officials immediately contacted Kent to see how San Francisco’s application was coming along. Kent responded that the city needed “ample time for open, vigorous debate on proposals which are as important and complex as the proposed City Demonstration Program.”135 In fact, the debates were becoming more than vigorous. Representatives from public works, public utilities, the Parks Department, and the SFRA all openly worried that the new Model Cities corporation would be usurping some of their respective powers in ways that might be illegal under the city charter.136 The planning campaign also confronted citizen worries that Model Cities would be a cover for bulldozer redevelopment, in spite of the fact that city officials constantly repeated the refrain that they were advancing “social and physical planning.” To ensure that there was capacity to move this agenda forward, Shelley actually hired both a mayor’s deputy of physical planning and a mayor’s deputy of social programs.137 The need for such a position became painfully apparent when the Hunters Point neighborhood erupted in September 1966, after police had shot an unarmed sixteen-year-old boy in the back while he fled. In the wake of the riots, Kent began insisting that even more emphasis be placed on social programs, especially employment programs, in Hunters Point.138 Even so, most residents were circumspect, and some small businessmen and homeowners were openly hostile.139 A Mission resident named Jack Bartalini—president of the Responsible Merchants, Property Owners and Tenants association—was particularly active, earning him what appears to have been the universal disdain of city employees. One planner who ran a community outreach event reported that “Bartolini [sic] attempted to disrupt the meeting. I decided to give him enough rope so he could hang himself and he did. Even those who were inclined to believe his rumors told him to sit down and be quiet.”140 The rumor was that Model Cities would be a bulldozer project, with no community involvement. But in spite of Bartalini’s personal abrasiveness, his view of the program clearly had purchase.141 The Board of Supervisors eventually felt compelled to respond directly, with flyers: “It has been rumored that the proposed program would be a ‘bulldozer-type’ program such as the Western Addition I redevelopment project. Nothing could be further from the truth. The whole purpose of the proposed City Demonstration Program is to strengthen the many

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very good neighborhoods in the area and to not repeat the mistakes of the past.” The flyer went on to say that “rumors have been spread that there would be no local control of the proposed Program by representative citizens from throughout the entire area. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every proposal that has been considered to carry out the Program would involve effective local participation.”142 It was true that in this round of internal debates, most proposals insisted that the target areas have majority representation on any planning entity that would be created—this thanks in part to the new voices in the debates, like the HRC and EOC.143 Stepping back, the position taken by the Board of Supervisors was most notable because it illustrated the extent to which city officials had now accepted that the Western Addition redevelopment was a failure, a mistake from the past. This view was now common sense and uncontroversial.144 Even SPUR and the downtown business community seemed to be coming around to this position.145 In 1966, San Francisco Business Magazine editorialized that “redevelopment has its place, an important one, in the continuing life of the City. However, there are additional solutions available which, if followed, can keep the wrecking ball and bulldozers from all but the most sadly neglected and impossibly deteriorated portions of the City.”146 Rehabilitation programs, the editorial argued, were the future. But though San Francisco’s planning regime was at least saying that it was moving toward social as well as physical solutions, the city had a long way to go before it could win back the trust of residents in poor neighborhoods. In March 1967, Kent would finally recommend that San Francisco scrap its application for a Model Cities project in Hunters Point. “We believe in citizen participation,” he said, arguing that there had been insufficient time to ensure the meaningful involvement of area residents. The citizen groups that had been involved in discussions did not see eye to eye on what kind of plan was needed for the area. “There are responsible, honest disagreements, and these will not disappear.”147 This was the context in which the discussion over urban renewal in the Mission was taking place: Model Cities was running into resistance in Hunters Point largely because residents feared that it was another version of urban renewal—urban renewal as it had been implemented in the Western Addition, in particular.

Conclusion San Francisco underwent profound changes during the 1960s. As the downtown consolidated its role as a world capital of finance, many of

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the neighborhoods suffered. In some areas, the official response to these problems proved disastrous to residents. As a result of a planning process that exhibited an unmistakable racial bias, an entire African American neighborhood—the Fillmore—would be leveled by the SFRA. But a community reaction began the moment the bulldozers went to work. Soon thereafter, elements within the municipal government also began to react. Cognizant of what might befall the Mission District if it remained passive, the Merchants and the MNC launched a collaborative planning effort with the city. The effort could not have been timed better. Prominent members of first the Christopher and then the Shelley administrations were openly questioning the SFRA on the Western Addition project. The civil rights movement and Great Society programs also spurred the creation of new organizations, like the HRC and the EOC, organizations that were focused on encouraging real citizen participation and protecting the rights of the poor above all else. It was largely due to the influence of this new social planning regime that municipal agencies would prove so willing to collaborate with the Mission groups. The Mission provided the social planning regime an opportunity to demonstrate that the city could work with a neighborhood; the neighborhood simultaneously enabled the new planning regime to strengthen its own position within municipal government. The first round of debates over Model Cities in San Francisco illustrates a number of key shifts in urban planning practice. First, they show the extent to which the new voices—like the HRC and the EOC—exerted influence over planning policy. The debates also demonstrate the way that planning policy, at the local and also the federal level, had already moved toward devolving governmental authority to smaller units of urban organization by 1966. Finally, they illustrate the extent to which the nascent Model Cities program shaped the city’s perspective on existing urban renewal efforts. The Mission renewal itself was viewed, within city government, as a kind of Model Cities prototype and as a test case for possible future demonstration areas. The Mission plan would focus more on rehabilitation than on clearance; it was to be generated in collaboration with the neighborhood, rather than being imposed upon it. Even so, the final plan would have problems that would lead the neighborhood to oppose it.

ELEVEN

Who Holds Final Authority? The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and the Mission Council on Redevelopment On March 27, 1967, residents of the Mission District packed the chambers of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors until there was standing-room only. Another three hundred neighborhood residents were picketing right outside. The supervisors were about to vote on whether to apply for federal funding for an urban renewal project in the Mission. Responding to overwhelming displays of community resistance, the supervisors voted six to five against the application that the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) had drawn up. Key organizers of the neighborhood campaign celebrated “having beaten the ‘federal bulldozer.’”1 While it was unusual for a neighborhood-based group to win a showdown over a redevelopment or a highway plan, it certainly was not unprecedented. Indeed, San Francisco’s recent past provided a case study of how neighborhood opposition could stop radically transformative modernization projects: in 1959 the Board of Supervisors had voted to stop all new freeway construction. As inspiration, the Mission organizers cited promising movements in the Cooper Square neighborhood in New York City, Woodlawn in Chicago, and West Central in Detroit.2 Recent events in New York City might have also provided encouragement. In 1964, a neighborhood group led by the writer and urbanist Jane Jacobs stopped the Manhattan Expressway from decimating much of Greenwich Village. The expressway had been championed by Robert Moses, who still enjoys a reputation as the “master builder” and the “planning czar” of New York—a visionary yet autocratic official who wielded tremendous power.3 One participant in the neighborhood revolt later exclaimed, “I wonder how David felt when he bested Goliath. That’s the way we felt. We felt . . . we beat Robert Moses, you know!”4 Confrontations between communities and planning agencies would of-

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ten be cast as David and Goliath stories during the 1960s. In many places, the metaphor seems to work. For example, San Francisco’s and New York’s freeway revolts were zero-sum contests over whether something would be built or not built; they were comparatively clear-cut battles between powerful governmental agencies and weaker citizen groups. In the Mission, by contrast, the story was more complex. While the neighborhood’s confrontation with the SFRA remains notable as one of a handful of examples of a neighborhood group prevailing over a transportation department or redevelopment agency, the story is more notable for the extent to which the opposing sides actually shared aims—and even collaborated in trying to achieve those aims. Neighborhood activists did celebrate having stopped the federal bulldozer, but that description is best understood as the discourse of a political campaign—the campaign to win planning power for the Mission.5 The SFRA’s plan would not have relied heavily on the bulldozer, at least not when viewed alongside the other redevelopment projects to which, in the midst of the fight, organizers routinely compared the Mission plan. The scheme called for clearances primarily in two areas, areas that were slated for stations in the new BART system. Outside of the immediate vicinity of the stations, however, the Mission plan proposed extensive rehabilitation and for new social services. This made the Mission unique among SFRA plans in the first two decades of its operations. As this chapter will show, the plan’s comparative sensitivity was largely explained by the fact that neighborhood groups had been involved in the planning process from the outset. Indeed it was the Mission Merchants and the Mission Neighborhood Centers (MNC) that requested an SFRA study to begin with. The comparative sensitivity is also explained by the fact that a new social planning regime had emerged from within city government to advocate on behalf of the neighborhood. Without any obvious intention of clearing the Mission, and facing new constraints after the failures of the Western Addition project, Justin Herman did not exactly look like Goliath—or even like Robert Moses. And with a number of influential allies in city government, the Mission did not much resemble David. Indeed, the new representative neighborhood group—calling itself the Mission Council on Redevelopment (MCOR)— initially decided not to oppose urban renewal but to support it. Though the council always voiced concern about the large clearances proposed in the plan, it also agreed with the SFRA’s assessment of the troubles that the Mission faced—and it agreed with most of the SFRA’s recommendations about how to address those troubles. Crucially, the neighborhood groups also

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accepted the SFRA’s analysis that the urban renewal program was the best available tool to mitigate the real estate speculation that would inevitably accompany the construction of the BART stations. In other words, the neighborhood groups now believed that government intervention provided the best tool to maintain low-income housing. By the time the plan came before the Board of Supervisors, MCOR had decided to oppose the application only because the SFRA and the city were unable to guarantee that the council would have veto power over any aspect of the plan. The primary issue was not the substance of the plan itself but the question of where planning authority would ultimately reside: Would a municipal agency—one beholden to downtown interests—have final say? Or would the neighborhood itself have final say? By the mid-1960s, these questions were being asked in every serious planning debate. Collectively these debates demonstrate that a shift was under way in planning practice in San Francisco, both within city government and in the neighborhoods.

The Rehabilitation-Renewal Plan The urban design study for the Mission—authored by the firm of Okamoto/Liskamm—was unique among SFRA projects. In terms of process, the plan was unique because neighborhood-based groups had originally requested that the SFRA conduct a study, and it was those same groups that originally hired the design firm.6 These groups—the Mission Merchants and the MNC—fit the bill for what the Christopher administration had defined as formal neighborhood leadership in 1956. The scheme was also unique among the SFRA’s projects to date in that it exhibited some sensitivity to existing urban and social fabric.7 Rather than relying on the bulldozer, the plan favored federally subsidized rehabilitation loans and grants for homeowners, rehabilitation loans and business services for merchants and other small businesses, and rent supplements for low-income residents.8 The proposed redevelopment area comprised 423 gross acres, or 271 net acres when street area was factored out.9 Rehabilitation was the treatment recommended for 70 percent of the structures within the survey area.10 Of the remaining 30 percent, only a small fraction would be cleared; the rest required no treatment at all.11 Designed to coordinate with the arrival of the BART stations, Okamoto/ Liskamm called for spot clearance for aging commercial buildings on Mission between Sixteenth and Twenty-Fourth Streets and for industrial buildings in the formerly no-lined areas of the northeastern Mission. The plan called for large clearances only in the areas immediately surrounding the

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two planned transit stations, one at Sixteenth and Mission Streets, and the other at Twenty-Fourth and Mission Streets.12 The plan would have cleared between eight and twelve square blocks. Four blocks would be cleared around the Sixteenth Street Station; and there were two versions of the plan for the Twenty-Fourth Street Station, one that would have cleared only another four blocks, and one that would have cleared eight. All of these areas were occupied mostly by aging retail, which would have been replaced with new retail, high-density housing, and office space. (See figs. 11.1–11.3.) The fact that it was primarily Mission Street commercial space that would have been cleared, rather than surrounding housing, is significant in light of the fact that it was the Mission Merchants who had requested the design study and chose the design firm. The Mission Merchants’ Association was not a reflexively pro-development group, as its recent opposition to freeway plans had illustrated.13 Though the large clearances would have represented a radical break from the existing physical fabric, in fact the rebuilding of commercial infrastructure, with the aim of attracting cityand even region-wide shopping activity, was perfectly consistent with the

Figure 11.1. Rendering of Twenty-Fourth Street BART Station. (Compare to the rendering of Sixteenth Street Station in fig. 11.6. In both images a small child appears, holding a balloon. In both cases the balloon flies higher than the tallest structures—presumably a method for making the buildings appear less imposing.) Okamoto/Liskamm, “Mission District Urban Design Study: Prepared for the San Francisco City Planning Commission,” 1966, 30.

Figure 11.2. Okamoto plan showing the more ambitious of the two development schemes for the BART stations at Sixteenth and Mission Streets, and TwentyFourth and Mission. Okamoto/Liskamm, “Mission District Urban Design Study,” 1966, 38.

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Figure 11.3. Land use and development pattern, Okamoto plan. Number coded model: (1) institutional, (2) residential, (3) industrial, (4) park, (5) plaza, (6) new development, (7) new and rehabilitation, (8) rehabilitation, (9) elevated walkway, (10) pedestrian greenway, (11) freeway, (12) major arterial, (13) rapid transit, (14) transit station, (15) parking. Okamoto/Liskamm, “Mission District Urban Design Study,” 1966, 20.

Mission Merchants Association’s policies, dating back to the early twentieth century. The Obreros, too, hewed to its roots and supported the SFRA’s plan, taking a position consistent with the long-standing traditions of the building trades. As for what was to be built on the cleared land, the design did exhibit an attention to the fine grain of the existing physical fabric. The edges of the proposed station developments, for example, attempted to create a fluid

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transition—in terms of scale, function, and style—between the modernist BART stations and rehabilitated nineteenth-century fabric, all within the confines a single block. (See fig. 11.4.) While these design moves do not appear terribly contextual to twenty-first-century sensibilities, they were in fact comparatively sensitive in this era when planners were accustomed to thinking only at the scale of entire city blocks. All of the clearances would have totaled about 80 acres, which was no small area, to be sure: about 4.5 percent of the Mission’s total 1,800 acres. But it paled in comparison to the Western Addition, where an area sixteen times that size, about 1,280 total acres of contiguous land occupied mostly with housing, was cleared,

Figure 11.4. Detail of proposed redevelopment around Sixteenth Street Station, demonstrating how existing, nineteenth-century urban fabric would be woven in with new development. Note, in particular, buildings marked by “7” for new and rehabilitated housing. The number coded model also includes (3) raised pedestrian level and (6) housing—parking below grade. Okamoto/Liskamm, “Mission District Urban Design Study,” 1966, 24.

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without any real provision to deal with the social consequences. Here is perhaps the most serious factual problem in the scholarly works on urban renewal in the Mission: none engage in a sustained analysis of the role of the SFRA, or even of the actual Okamoto/Liskamm document, but all suggest that the urban renewal plan for the Mission closely resembled the plan for the Western Addition.14 It didn’t. Even though the preliminary design study for the Mission described a project that would have been fundamentally different than the one carried out in the Western Addition, residents still worried that the bulldozers were idling. Some elements of the Mission’s leadership—like Herman Gallegos—might very well have been thinking about Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles. There an overwhelmingly Latino population was removed (some residents forcibly) when the neighborhood was cleared in 1954 to make way for Dodger Stadium.15 The Los Angeles chapter of the Community Service Organization (CSO)—a statewide civil rights advocacy group that focused on issues affecting Latinos—had originally supported the clearance of substandard housing, working to convince local Mexican residents to cooperate with condemnation proceedings. The CSO supported the clearances only because it was led to believe that the land would be used for new low-income housing. Once it became clear that the land would be used for a stadium, the CSO vocally opposed the plan and complained that the organization had been manipulated by planning authorities.16 Gallegos was a president of the San Jose chapter of the CSO at the time; in 1960, he would become national president of the organization. Gallegos was certainly aware of this history of a Latino neighborhood having been deceived and displaced through the urban renewal program. The fear of idling bulldozers was not assuaged by the fact that the Okamoto/Liskamm plan prominently featured drawings of the BART station areas showing high-rise offices, hotels, and parking structures, framed by vast retail plazas. All were rendered in a high-modernist architectural language that, by this period, was becoming associated in the popular imagination with mass displacement in low-income areas and corporate luxury in downtown areas. (See figs. 11.5 and 11.6.) Though these were the only elements of the plan that were out of scale with the existing urban fabric, the renderings were so arresting that when Mission residents saw them, they apparently called to mind the spectacular hole in the ground where the Fillmore neighborhood had recently stood. The Mission needed to respond.

Figure 11.5. Elevation of proposed Sixteenth Street Station area section. Okamoto/Liskamm, “Mission District Urban Design Study,” 1966, 23.

Figure 11.6. Sixteenth Street Station area perspective. Note the piñata, bodega, and taco kiosks. Okamoto/Liskamm, “Mission District Urban Design Study,” 1966, 36.

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The Mission Council on Redevelopment and the Changing Nature of Neighborhood-Based Planning An organizer named Mike Miller was brought to the Mission in 1966 by a number of neighborhood groups, including MACABI (the Mission’s federally funded equal opportunity corporation) and OBECA/Arriba Juntos (the St. Peter’s–funded Latino community service organization), the latter under the leadership of Herman Gallegos.17 MACABI and OBECA had invited Miller to help them formulate a response to urban renewal planning and also to introduce them to the “Alinsky model.” Miller had been trained by Saul Alinsky, the sociologist and activist who famously organized Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood in the 1940s. Alinsky’s approach was to form place-based “mass organizations” that would include all of an area’s influential entities and mobilize them around the goals of selfdetermination, institutional reform, and the alleviation of poverty.18 Miller’s guidance was crucial to the initial work of establishing the Mission Council on Redevelopment (MCOR), an organization formed for the explicit purpose of responding to the SFRA’s plans for the neighborhood. Though Miller was central to the formation and early work of the organization, as an outsider he would later defer to leadership from within the neighborhood. MCOR was made possible, in no small part, with War on Poverty resources, through MACABI, which provided early funding and staff; crucial resources also came from OBECA. MCOR succeeded in including most, but not all, of the Mission’s prominent interests. OBECA was involved, as were the other Latino social service providers, Catholic parish churches, tenants’ groups, homeowners’ groups, block clubs, and the emerging left-wing Raza youth groups (about whom more in the following chapter).19 According to Miller, the union Obreros were involved with MCOR, but they were only “nominal members,” torn between the promise of work provided by the SFRA and the prospect of being able to control planning in the neighborhood.20 Though urban renewal had been initiated by the Mission Merchants and the MNC, those groups now claimed allegiance to MCOR. This sudden appearance of MCOR seemed to confirm the Christopher administration’s 1956 analysis of the challenges facing urban renewal—the traditional leadership of a neighborhood was not the only leadership that mattered. Informal leaders might step forward at the last moment. The Merchants and the MNC had presumed to speak for the entire neighborhood, but they soon became only two voices in a larger coalition; in fact, the once-vocal Merchants quickly became passive members of the new coalition.

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MCOR’s first order of business was to mobilize the community, and the Okamoto/Liskamm renderings proved the perfect tool. Mike Miller observed that “it is the errors and activities of the opposition that provide the organizer with his most powerful weapons.”21 The SFRA’s critical error was representational. As Miller put it, the “plan showed new sky-scrapers and shopping center plazas in the Mission, but left unanswered the question ‘where am I in this picture?’ And it was this question that we raised with pastors, tenants, homeowners, small businessmen, community based agencies and anybody else we could talk to. Pointing to . . . the evidence of earlier urban renewal projects in the City, we could readily convince those with whom we spoke of the threat.”22 Miller’s use of the Okamoto/ Liskamm renderings was tactically shrewd, but the Mission never did face mass displacement on the scale of the Western Addition. Still, the SFRA’s record could not inspire confidence in neighborhood organizations. Once MCOR had the attention of local residents and interest groups, they began to articulate a range of concerns. From the far-right side of the spectrum, Bartalini and his Responsible Merchants, Property Owners and Tenants association aimed to defeat the SFRA outright. Bartalini favored a Federally Aided Code Enforcement (FACE) program for the neighborhood over any SFRA intervention. The Rapid Transit Corridor Study had found that FACE would be inappropriate for the Mission because it focused only on residential structures, and therefore had no mechanism to help small businessmen improve their properties.23 Nor did it have a mechanism allowing for infrastructural improvements (street paving, undergrounding of overhead wires, or improvements to schools, parks, playgrounds, and neighborhood centers). Worst of all, under FACE if an owner was unable to improve his or her property, that property could be condemned.24 Bartalini was not worried about these prospects. From the far left of the spectrum, John Ross, of the Tenants Union and the Progressive Labor Party, a Maoist group, expressed concern that the “rehabilitation plan would help only the big interests” in the first place. “Renewed housing would bring higher rents which little people aren’t able to pay. There would be fewer places where they could afford to live.”25 Bartalini and his group never got much traction, but Ross’s ideas received more of a hearing, even though most Mission leaders saw Ross himself as too extreme.26 But MCOR was unified in its concern that “rehabilitation” might mean that any structures within the area would have to “live up to FHA standards” about minimum dimensions for housing—like specifications about storage space and closets, for example, standards that were “most unrealistic for structures where poor people reside.”27 This moment

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was notable because it saw an early expression of anti-gentrification politics: it was the first time that Mission residents took a defensive posture against speculative displacement. It would certainly not be the last. In fact, the SFRA did not disagree with this assessment, and the city’s application to HUD for a planning grant, as well as the Okamoto/Liskamm plan, both called for homeowner rehabilitation grants to be paired with rental supplements to avoid precisely this scenario.28 The Housing Act of 1965 had loosened standards in order to give cities more leeway to ensure the success of rehabilitation programs, and the SFRA was prepared to take advantage of the new rules. Even so, with so many other blotches on its record, the SFRA’s promises not to displace current residents were met with skepticism. As the Examiner reported, by 1966 the SFRA was “in trouble. In the Mission they call it a plague.”29 But this reputation was based on the SFRA’s track record, not on the Okamoto/Liskamm plan. In fact, the only objection that MCOR consistently voiced about the details of the actual plan related to the large clearances around the BART stations—the neighborhood groups supported rehabilitation and improved services. The principal objection that MCOR raised was less about the details of the plan itself, and more about the institutional configurations through which planning was to be carried out. The neighborhood was not content to allow an external agency to plan for it; Mission residents were again determined to plan for themselves. MCOR did not oppose urban renewal. In fact, Bartalini and his constituency were openly suspicious of the council because they feared that that its leaders favored redevelopment.30 However, MCOR actually took a much more nuanced and pragmatic approach. As Miller put it, the council “took the position that if it was going to support renewal, it would need to have veto power over any plan, and would itself have to be recognized by the City as the group that would develop a plan with the renewal agency.”31 This was essentially the same position that the Merchants and MNC had taken in early conversations with the SFRA, planning department, representatives of downtown, and the mayor’s office.32 But the Merchants and the MNC had been supplanted as the recognized representatives of the neighborhood; they were now only two elements in a larger coalition. MCOR’s position was first discussed by the SFRA at their June 28, 1966, regular meeting.33 Justin Herman agreed to work with the organization, but he insisted that the SFRA not be beholden to any single neighborhood group. The meeting became contentious, with MCOR supporters chiding the agency for not disseminating its information in Spanish as well as English, and for generally failing to inform the community of plans being

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made for it. Even members of the SFRA board began to dissent: Lawrence Palacios “indicated that there should not be a plan without consulting with the people of the area.”34 Dr. Joseph Wellington “then said that he disagreed with the proposed position recommended by the Agency staff and stated that Mr. [Justin] Herman assumes everyone has the same good feeling for the Agency that he has. The Agency cannot go into a community and offer its own plan on a take it or leave it basis.”35 Everett Griffin, chairman of the SFRA’s board, took a more defensive tack: None of us are ogres. We want good housing in the Mission for the people of the Mission at prices they can afford. But we must proceed in a businesslike way, and we can get the things done with the Mission people to the maximum extent of the law if they and we can work together. We certainly want this to happen. Concern for what happened in the Western Addition A-1 is understandable and proper. The agency used every tool it had to get better housing. Today it is fortunate we have many more tools and we intend to use them all. The program has changed, and we have changed with it.36

The additional tools Griffin referred to were outlined in the city’s application to HUD for a planning grant for the Mission: “New tools recently made available in the Housing Act of 1965 including 1) 3 percent rehabilitation loans for homeowners and businessmen, 2) rehabilitation grants to low-income homeowners in hardship situations, 3) rent supplements, and 4) expanded Small Business Administration services.” These tools, the application stated, “make the type of rehabilitation-renewal program presently contemplated much more feasible than ever before.”37 None of these provisions were in place when the Western Addition project began, but the mayor had made clear that he would not support an urban renewal plan in the Mission unless all of the new tools were brought to bear.38 Griffin was also suggesting that the culture of the SFRA itself had changed, having been chastened by the community outrage over the Western Addition. All available evidence suggests that Griffin was quite sincere. At least the agency’s leaders were trying to change, and the Mission was their opportunity to demonstrate that they could do rehabilitation rather than just clearance, and that they could work with a community rather than against it. At the end of the June 28, 1966, meeting, the SFRA adopted the position that plans would be made in cooperation with Mission neighborhood groups—but without giving any neighborhood group veto power. This arrangement was still unacceptable to MCOR, and the council continued its efforts to convince the SFRA. MCOR made another presentation

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at the regular meeting on August 9, 1966. Father John McCarthy, representing the Catholic Archdiocese, voiced the neighborhood’s desire to “meet and cooperate with the Agency.”39 Gallegos reiterated that they were “attempting to arrive at a working relationship with the Agency.”40 The reason MCOR invested so much energy trying to collaborate, rather than simply opposing urban renewal, was that it had come around to the view that the Mission needed the SFRA. Though the council was initially skeptical, it now accepted the analysis that without SFRA intervention the BART stations would trigger speculation that would, in turn, trigger displacement.41 Recent meetings between MCOR and representatives from the Western Addition had likely influenced the council. “Mr. Ulysses Montgomery” told MCOR that he believed “the only way to provide adequate housing for the upper-low and low-middle income category of families is through the combined tools of urban renewal, nonprofit building and management, and rent supplements. Without rent supplements, such housing is impossible.”42 Rent supplements were only available through urban renewal. However, Montgomery believed that a neighborhood would need to be in control not only of the planning process but also of the development process, which was why a neighborhood must form an independent nonprofit. Without this condition, and without rent supplements, urban renewal would not work. But Ulysses emphasized that turning away urban renewal would be worse. MCOR agreed. As Miller put it, “A simple blocking of urban renewal would not be sufficient. . . . To preserve the Mission for its residents, and to finally improve their living conditions, required the ability . . . to both control and/or influence public sector activity.”43 So MCOR now believed that it needed urban renewal, but it held fast to the one condition that a representative neighborhood group have veto power. Herman held a number of meetings with the council to discuss possible arrangements. Judging by MCOR’s notes, Herman’s characteristic imperiousness was on full display in these meetings; at one point he apparently insisted that MCOR was “not truly representative of all Mission people.”44 It was a comment that might have been reasonable, given that the SFRA and planning department had spent years conducting hundreds of meetings with neighborhood groups like the MNC and the Mission Merchants—it might have been reasonable, that is, were it not for the fact that those same groups were now represented by MCOR. With specific reference to the troubles in the Western Addition, Herman also apparently “commented that citizen participation was a ‘modish’ idea, evidently implying that such demands would go out of style eventually.”45 Gallegos and Jerry Pence, co-chairmen of MCOR, complained that their “efforts to

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work with Justin Herman and his Commission in a civilized manner have been scorned. It is obvious that he is not interested in full citizens’ participation, but only in the immediate completion of his ambitious plans.” In reaction to these and other encounters, MCOR would later invite Robert Weaver, secretary of HUD, to investigate Herman—an effort that was unsuccessful.46 In spite of the enmity between the two sides, in these meetings Herman did acknowledge that MCOR was a legitimate neighborhood body, if not the legitimate body. Herman was receiving pressure not only from the neighborhood but also directly from the newer socially oriented agencies in municipal government, especially the city government’s Human Rights Commission (HRC).47 In a September 20, 1966, letter to the council, Herman formalized an arrangement wherein “MCOR is recognized by the SFRA as an official body to work with the Redevelopment Agency in  the planning and development of the Mission Street Survey Area.”48 But the letter clarified that “the Board of Supervisors must by law be the local body of last resort in the acceptance or rejection of the planning that will evolve.”49 In his meetings with MCOR, Herman actually urged the council to apply for Model Cities funding, because the organizational structure that MCOR advocated might be more feasible under that nascent program; but the law was clear with respect to the urban renewal program.50 Herman was correct on this last point, a fact that was recognized even by supervisors sympathetic to the Mission’s cause. For example, Supervisor McCarthy—who, at MCOR’s urging, would vote against the application for the Mission—told MCOR that its “demands were unrealizable under [the] present structure of city government, but [that] perhaps government structure might be altered to allow for such citizen group demands.”51 Since the necessary alterations would need to be made to federal law, not local law, as a practical matter nothing would change in the present round of discussions. MCOR objected that this meant in essence that they “would be treated in an advisory capacity only” and that its role as “an official body” gave it insufficient representation and guarantees.52 Maximum feasible participation had not, in the council’s view, been met. It was on these grounds that, “with extreme reluctance,” MCOR opposed the application for federal funding.53 When it became clear that Shelley was not going to pull his support of the application, MCOR sent him a telegram that read, in its entirety: “Your lack of leadership and inaction in supporting citizen participation in redevelopment in the Mission will force organized opposition to airport and MUNI rail way bonds and to your future political aspirations. Why is

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it that only violent uprisings bring bold leadership from you on issues facing the people[?]”54 The Board of Supervisors took up the SFRA’s request in December 1966, and MCOR “brought out a couple hundred people to the meeting.”55 Responding to the overwhelming neighborhood pressure, the board rejected the application by a vote of six to five. In the wake of the vote, the SFRA, SPUR, and the mayor began meeting with MCOR again to see if a workable plan could be salvaged. One concern that had always been at issue, but had never been resolved, was the question of technical expertise. If MCOR was looking for control over the planning process, how would it exercise that control? Would a neighborhood group develop its own planning expertise? Would it hire its own planners from the private or nonprofit sector? Would the neighborhood contract with city agencies to conduct studies and make plans at its sole discretion? Or would it simply leave the job to the agencies already in charge, like the SFRA and the DCP, with sufficient guarantees that it would be able to influence the process? At the outset, the SFRA and the downtown interests took a patronizing tone on the subject. “You can’t be burdened with details,” Herman informed MCOR.56 The SFRA should take community input into account, according to SPUR, but then must move forward with the planning as it sees fit, as “the lay citizen is not an expert.”57 The mayor’s deputy for social programs took the position that the neighborhood should plan for itself, but it should call upon city agencies for technical assistance.58 Representatives of the HRC felt that the neighborhood group should be provided with “adequate funds to hire its own planning experts.”59 MCOR considered a range of possibilities, from hiring its own “technical staff,” or an external “advocate planner,” to subcontracting with the SFRA to conduct studies on its behalf—all arrangements that would be funded by local and/or federal governments.60 Herman eventually demonstrated some receptivity to these possibilities, suggesting that surveys could be conducted by the agency, or by a third-party consultant, contracted by MCOR.61 Since it was unlikely that the council would be doing the planning, another set of discussions revolved around the question of how a new neighborhood planning body would be constituted. In January, Shelley agreed to create a citizens’ committee to participate in planning for the Mission. Though the committee would officially be appointed by the mayor, he would agree to choose a majority of the committee members from a list submitted by MCOR. The SFRA would file quarterly reports with the Board of Supervisors, and would be compelled to file additional reports whenever the committee requested. The final plan would have to be submitted

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to the committee ninety days before being submitted to the supervisors. During that period, the committee would produce its own report on the plan, which would “become an official part of the record and accompany the redevelopment plan to the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors.”62 Though this arrangement provided more participation than any previously agreed upon, it still failed to give the neighborhood a veto, leaving it in an advisory capacity. In other words, MCOR’s report would go into the official record, but the Board of Supervisors would be free to ignore the contents of that report. Over the coming months, the SFRA and SPUR pushed forward in spite of the fact that the fundamental disagreement with the neighborhood group had never been resolved.63 The SFRA mounted a public relations campaign in the Mission, distributing fliers that took a Q&A format: “Is this program anything like those in the Western Addition or Hunters Point?” “No. Rehabilitation is different from earlier programs. The Mission is a good neighborhood, but a Rehabilitation-Renewal plan is needed to keep it that way.”64

The SFRA brought the application before the board again in the spring of 1967. The revised resolution made abundant reference to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, drawing particular attention to Section VI, which provided that no person shall be discriminated against “in the undertaking and carrying out of urban renewal projects assisted under Title I of the Housing Act of 1949.”65 Without veto power, however, such assurances would not convince MCOR. The council reiterated its basic demands to the mayor. Both Shelley and Kent were eager to accommodate MCOR, but understood that the city did not, in fact, have the legal right to grant the council a veto.66 The new application met the same community resistance and another six-to-five vote. So went the battle over the initial urban renewal plan: not a heroic turning back of the federal bulldozer, but a reluctant protest against rigid and technocratic planning processes.

Downtown Planning Regime versus Social Planning Regime With this battle behind Mission residents, and with nothing other than the threat and opportunity of renewal to unite them, MCOR dissolved. San Francisco’s applications for Model Cities in Hunters Point and urban renewal in the Mission were both scrapped in March 1967. But at the same

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time, a debate between the downtown planning regime and the social planning regime had been simmering. That debate now erupted into a fight, one that occasionally spilled out into the press. Joseph Arington, the mayor’s deputy for social planning, wrote to SPUR to say that he thought it right to reject the applications. The HRC took the same position, as did the EOC.67 Citizen participation was workable, Arington felt, but recent efforts had not gone nearly far enough. Meaningful participation should maximize “self help,” and should allow a neighborhood to “1) mobilize its internal resources toward the resolution of its own problems. 2) Feel responsible for using resultant services. 3) Achieve independent initiative. 4) Question Public Power.”68 For Arington, Mission residents were in the right, then, when they “refused to let downtown decision makers handle their program.”69 What was needed, in short, was to “redefine the role of government in neighborhood planning.”70 After having supported the initial application, the mayor had come around to Arington’s position, but Shelley felt that the initiative to redefine the role of government in the neighborhood must come from an independent group within the neighborhood itself.71 The fact that such statements emanated from within city government at all marked a striking break from the dominance, in the immediate postwar period, of San Francisco’s downtown-based planning regime. That did not mean, however, that the downtown-based planning regime was silenced. Predictably, SPUR and the SFRA felt differently than did the newer factions. It was the very existence of those new factions that explains why SPUR would even think to defend an “undemocratic” planning agenda in the Yerba Buena area as “legal and desirable for the health of the city.”72 SPUR was defending its increasingly unpopular position against a growing insurgency within municipal government itself. In a San Francisco Progress article, titled “Neighborhoods vs. City Hall,” a SPUR official was reported to have said that “some of the protest emanating from the Mission renewal controversy was not sincere and underlined the need to differentiate between solidly based representative citizen groups and ‘300 loudmouths.’”73 At stake was not just the question about whether vocal neighborhood groups were truly representative; SPUR and the SFRA also openly worried about the loss of substantial federal funding: “forty million or more dollars for the Model Cities program and approximately ninety million dollars for Mission renewal. This is a lot of money” for San Francisco.74 SPUR insisted, however, that the funding was not its principal concern, repeating the analysis that the free market—“the indifferent forces of economic

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expediency”—was not likely to treat the neighborhoods better than the federal programs would have.75 On this point, Mission groups had actually always agreed; the neighborhood may have turned back the SFRA, but this move left them exposed to the market, which might deliver a worse outcome. The SFRA and SPUR have been painted in an unsympathetic light in the history books for several reasons. Not only was the Western Addition project a textbook example of urban renewal as “negro removal,” but the postwar planning regime’s discourse—the talk of loudmouths from the community and the need for undemocratic planning agendas—sounds remarkably tone-deaf to the ears of most observers living in the post–civil rights era. But the fact that the Redevelopment Agency was caught off guard by the resistance it encountered in the Mission is fairly understandable. The SFRA had, in fact, conducted hundreds of meetings with residents of the neighborhood and had also been working with representative groups from the neighborhood for five years. It was the Mission Merchants Association that had requested the study to begin with. The neighborhood’s most influential social services agency, the MNC, had formed the Greater Mission Citizens Council to consult with the SFRA on the details of a rehabilitation program for the area. The Mission had been a test case for the SFRA; it was here that the agency was turning over a new leaf, devising a rehabilitation rather than a clearance plan and involving the neighborhood from the outset. This was how the effort was viewed not only by the SFRA and SPUR but also by the mayor and initially by many voices in the emerging social planning regime. As Shelley wrote to the Board of Supervisors, “Nowhere in the United States, to my knowledge, has a renewal effort been formulated with such substantial guarantees to protect the rights of those who presently live and work in the area in question. The City Attorney has advised that this resolution goes as far as the law will allow.”76 In spite of some reservations about whether the Spanish-speaking community was sufficiently involved, Kent and the mayor regarded the planning in the Mission as a model of cooperation—interagency cooperation, and cooperation between the government and the citizens—a model that could be emulated in the coming Demonstration City program.77 The SFRA had indeed gone to great lengths to involve neighborhood groups. What it failed to realize was that the very nature of neighborhood organizing underwent a transformation during the period between when the SFRA began its study and when it brought the application before the Board of Supervisors. Again, it was a scenario that the Christopher ad-

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ministration had predicted as early as 1956. Through the 1950s, urban neighborhoods were represented by improvement clubs, merchants’ associations, and perhaps by settlement-house-affiliated service agencies like the MNC. The times were changing, though, a perception that was vividly captured by Kent when, in another context, he described the improvement clubs as being “controlled by old and crusty people.”78 In a less expressive moment, Kent stated, “Most [improvement clubs] take a very short and limited view of the problem of neighborhood planning.”79 Neighborhoods were now organizing less around beautification and service provision and more around issues of poverty, discrimination, and ethnic identity. This was a distinct shift, even from the period when the urban renewal program began, a shift that was partly explained by the larger context of the civil rights movement and partly by resistance to the misdeeds of the urban renewal program itself. The shift was particularly visible in the discussions over a proposed Spanish cultural and trade center. The idea had been proposed not by the SFRA but by the MNC, as a way to celebrate “the Spanish heritage of the past, as well as  .  .  . the importance of the many thousands of Spanishspeaking families who continue to settle in the area.”80 For Kriegsfeld, the leader of the MNC, the heritage center was part of a strategy “to give the residents a feeling of identity as a neighborhood, so they’ll want to stay.”81 But that was 1962. By 1966, several things changed. Celebrating an imagined Spanish heritage became much less important than attending to the Latino present. Patronage projects became much less important than process. In its meetings with Justin Herman, the largely Latino MCOR objected to the Spanish cultural and trade center because the council viewed it as “an example of the poor planning process that redevelopment is supposed to curtail. How can three blocks be allocated for such a center before the planning grant is even adopted, and before such a center is studied in relation to the rest of the Mission?”82 The SFRA was perfectly willing to make concessions in the form of specific projects, but it was caught off guard by this shift in the aims of neighborhood organizing. This had been the Shelley administration’s last opportunity to move forward with a planning agenda in the Mission.

Conclusion Once Mission-based groups resolved to oppose the SFRA’s “Survey and Planning Application” for federal urban renewal funds, they threw their full weight behind the effort to stop the planning process. Employing the

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tactics of protests politics and leveraging its considerable support from neighborhood residents, MCOR prevailed upon the supervisors to reject the application twice within a four-month period. The drama of these scenes—which in many ways resembled the protests associated with the freeway revolt—has obscured the contours of the discussion over urban renewal in the Mission. MCOR adopted a firm anti-renewal stance only after many months spent pursuing urban renewal in collaboration with the SFRA. For its part, the SFRA made what appear to be good-faith efforts to involve the neighborhood to the maximum extent that current law would allow, in spite of Justin Herman’s unflaggingly imperious bearing. It is difficult to escape the impression that Herman was the consummate technocrat, willing to do whatever it took to get a project done. But with a rapidly changing federal legal framework, widespread protest over the failures of the Western Addition project, and the growing influence of a social planning regime that was eager to devolve power to neighborhoods, getting a project done in the Mission meant involving the Mission. In the heat of the fight, MCOR mobilized residents by pointing to the Western Addition, suggesting that what happened there was about to happen here. But that was more organizing tactic than reality. The Okamoto/ Liskamm plan would have cleared a large area around the BART stations, but it was about 6 percent of the area cleared in the Western Addition. The rest of the Mission was slated for a rehabilitation program and for social services. Moreover, MCOR’s principal objection was not about any specific aspect of the initial plan—not even the large clearances. The main point of contention was about process: would the neighborhood be involved in only an advisory capacity, or would the neighborhood have veto power? In the Mission, then, the SFRA appears more sensitive and collaborative than one would guess from the existing scholarship; at the same time, the neighborhood-based planning effort appears more pragmatic, and less episodic and reactionary, than the existing scholarship would suggest. The story of the Mission’s initial encounter with urban renewal also demonstrates that the 1960s witnessed a profound shift in the nature of neighborhood-based planning. Improvement clubs, parish churches, and merchants’ associations were now only parts of a larger coalition that was concerned less with specific infrastructure projects and more with fundamental questions surrounding rights. The social service providers, tenants’ advocates, and civil rights groups were not like the old neighborhood organizations. But in the Mission it was easy to see how these new groups were born out of, and nurtured by, the unions, merchants’ associations, parish churches, and improvement clubs that preceded them.

T W E LV E

The Return to the City within a City: The Mission Coalition Organization and the Devolution of Planning Power Shortly after the Mission defeated San Francisco’s application for urban renewal study funds in 1967, the federal government rolled out a new Great Society program called Model Cities, partly in response to the critique that urban renewal had not allowed for sufficient citizen participation. When it became clear that the Mission was a candidate for Model Cities, the individuals and groups behind the Mission Council on Renewal (MCOR) now reconvened to build a broad-based coalition that could claim to be truly representative: the Mission Coalition Organization (MCO). At the heart of the MCO was a multiethnic solidarity that had been fostered by the Merchants, unions, and especially the Catholic parish churches. Trading on its strong support within the neighborhood, the MCO was able to win planning power under the auspices of the Model Cities program. Working with Mayor Joseph Alioto, San Francisco then created its newest agency—the Mission Model Neighborhood Corporation (MMNC), a locally based planning authority that was controlled by the MCO. Like the Redevelopment Agency, the MMNC was formally a private, nonprofit entity that functioned as a public authority. But while the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) operated throughout San Francisco, the MMNC was the planning authority for the Mission only; and while the SFRA had been beholden to downtown, the MMNC would be beholden to Mission residents alone. The new neighborhood organizations would also create the Mission Housing Development Corporation (MHDC), which might be described as the Mission version of the citywide Housing Authority. Together, these organizations would create new public housing, a jobs program, and a range of social services. Through architecture and arts programs, the new organizations would foster a sense of unity, as well as a sense of pride—pride in a Latino identity, but more broadly in a modern,

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Figure 12.1. Undated photograph of Flor de Maria Crane, Housing Committee chair of the Mission Coalition Organization. Photograph by Spence Limbocker, El Tecolote archives.

metropolitan, multiethnic identity—pride in being from the Mission. Through their political savvy, the organizations would successfully reassert the prerogative of the neighborhood to plan for itself. In short, a new neighborhood planning regime would revitalize the Mission as a city within a city. The new planning regime reinvigorated a kind of neighbor-

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hood capitalism that had prevailed in the Progressive Era, but with some crucial differences. While Progressive Era groups emphasized free enterprise and material advancement, the new planning regime advanced a vision of a managed economy, one in which the interests of industrial, finance, and real estate capital would be prevented from displacing existing residents. Many students of San Francisco history are acquainted with the story of the Mission District in the 1960s. From the historian’s perspective, the neighborhood mobilization from that era is almost unique insofar as the fine-grained details of the community experience are better understood than is the institutional story.1 Constrained by source availability, historians generally tend to magnify the voices of well-established officials and agencies, and to diminish (though usually not by design) the voices of ordinary people. So the Mission histories are a welcome corrective. However, several crucial aspects of the larger story have also been obscured by the focus on the Mission’s neighborhood groups. Among the key details that have been overlooked is the fact that there was a new social planning regime that was eager to give power away to the neighborhoods. Also, the neighborhood groups did not begin by opposing urban renewal; indeed, MCOR had doggedly pursued urban renewal funds before opposing the SFRA on governance issues. In addition, the draft plan for the Mission recommended more rehabilitation—and less clearance—than has been understood. Perhaps most importantly, once the neighborhood planning regime was in charge, it collaborated with the redevelopment agency, defended it against budget cuts, and acted on all of its original recommendations, with the exception of the clearances around the BART stations. By overlooking all of these facts, the established accounts inadvertently present a David and Goliath narrative, one that exaggerates the autonomy of the neighborhood, giving the MCO all of the credit for the neighborhood’s success and all of the blame for its failures. This closing chapter of Making the Mission reconsiders the story of the neighborhood groups by putting that story into tension with the broader institutional perspective. This study reaffirms the view that the new neighborhood planning regime was remarkably powerful when considered alongside the other urban neighborhood groups of the 1960s. But it also emphasizes that the story cannot be understood without considering key structural factors. The MCO was not sui generis; it was an expression of a local organizing tradition that dated back at least to the earthquake and fire of 1906. Following federal Great Society programs, municipal policy had become much more open to neighborhood planning power by 1968. The MCO dissolved in the early 1970s not only because of internal orga-

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nizational problems but also because the administration of Richard Nixon cut funding for Model Cities and slashed funding for urban renewal.

The Reestablishment of Neighborhood-Based Planning: Model Cities, Round Two In November 1967, San Francisco elected a new mayor, Joseph Alioto, a former chairman of the SFRA.2 He received a good deal of support from the Mission, and particularly from the Obreros, who had delivered him a large constituency at the ballot box, and to whom Alioto was now beholden.3 On November 22, 1967, Justin Herman sent mayor-elect Alioto a confidential letter about the situation in the Mission. “The major problem is political,” he wrote. “There was never any serious controversy regarding the need for renewal efforts or of the preliminary planning recommendations for the area in question.”4 Herman’s assessment was correct—the problem was political in the sense that final authority would not have rested with the neighborhood; but it was also political in that Herman’s own reputation as an autocrat had damaged the SFRA’s credibility. Herman understood this well, which is part of the reason he recommended that Alioto enter into “serious discussions” with a representative neighborhood group about “what they would like to see in the way of a renewal effort,” and then collaborate with the group on a Model Cities application.5 Once in office, Alioto took Herman’s advice and announced his intention to apply for a multimillion-dollar Model Cities grant for the Mission. He had reason to believe that the neighborhood might support the application, given its initial position on the SFRA’s plan, and also considering the support he had received from the Obreros. After the announcement, MCOR reconvened to create the Mission Coalition Organization (MCO) in order to formulate the neighborhood’s position on Model Cities. The composition of the MCO was substantially the same as MCOR, only now the Obreros and the Mission Merchants’ Association were more fully involved, on equal footing with OBECA/Arriba Juntos, the tenants’ groups, social service providers, homeowners’ groups, Raza youth groups, and the parish churches.6 The MCO also succeeded in bringing in the major labor councils, the SFLC and (after some tense negotiations) the BTC.7 The only groups that remained completely outside of the MCO were absentee landlords and the Responsible Merchants, Property Owners and Tenants organization, under the leadership of the “rightwing populist” Jack Bartalini. This constituency opposed urban renewal, the War on Poverty, and Model Cities on the principle that all of these pro-

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grams were “examples of creeping socialism.”8 Bartalini had been involved in the earliest stages of organizing MCOR, but he peeled off once it became clear that the council would not seek to absolutely “defeat” the SFRA. With organizing help from Mike Miller and OBECA, the first convention of the MCO was held in Centro Obrero Social Hall on October 4, 1968. The meeting was attended by about “500–600 delegates and alternates from 66 organizations.”9 Delegates elected OBECA’s Ben Martinez as president of the coalition, but key leadership positions were also held by the Obreros and the tenants’ unions. In order to ensure that the MCO would represent the broadest possible constituency, the organization created five “interest group vice presidencies” and nine “nationality vice presidencies.”10 The MCO also created twelve committees to address the concerns of the membership, including committees on housing, education, employment, and community maintenance and planning. It was through these committees that the diverse organizations advanced their own agendas. No positions were reserved for women, but women did represent more than a third of the leadership, occupying the first executive vice presidency (Elba Tuttle), sixth executive vice presidency (Ena Aguirre Spackman), and the chairmanship of the vitally important Housing Committee (Flor de Maria Crane, pictured in fig. 12.1).11 This marked the first time in the twentieth century that women had prominent voices in issues of planning in the Mission District. Though it encompassed a broad range of interest groups, the network of committees served to foster a measure of unity that would have been difficult to accomplish under other organizational structures. To give an example of how unity was created, consider the Merchants, who were involved primarily with the planning committee and were suspicious of radical ethnic politics.12 If the Merchants wanted the MCO’s support in its effort to ban pawnshops, it would have to provide backing for the Raza youth groups’ position on the strike at San Francisco State University; conversely, if the youth groups wanted MCO backing for the strike, they would have to support the Merchants’ position on pawnshops.13 The MCO struggled with many internecine battles, but its pragmatic organizational style also enabled it to present a unified front to city agencies, at least until the early 1970s. Like its predecessor, the MCO insisted on veto power over any plan that was drawn up for the Mission. But because it continued to believe that state intervention provided the best opportunity to forestall real estate speculation, the MCO also supported the idea of “joint planning with the urban renewal agency.”14 Even though both sides were eager to com-

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promise, there were features of the Model Cities program that would have to be navigated carefully. The program mandated “widespread citizen participation,” but left the specific mechanisms for how to accomplish participation up to the nation’s mayors. In comparison with urban renewal, the program meant more citizen participation; but when viewed alongside other War on Poverty programs, which largely bypassed mayors and dealt directly with nonprofits, the program meant less citizen control.15 The fact that Model Cities provided funding for rehabilitation and social services would make the program attractive to leaders of the Mission; the fact that it was a mayors’ program would guarantee a conflict. Mayor Alioto was amenable to working with the MCO, but he knew that HUD would refuse to give the organization veto power—federal law required that a separate corporation be created under the mayor’s office to implement plans and disburse funds. The mayor agreed, however, to an arrangement wherein the Board of Directors of the corporation would be under the effective control of the MCO: of the twenty-one members on the board, fourteen would be appointed by the mayor from a list provided by the MCO, while seven would be chosen by the mayor from the broader community.16 In terms of its organizational structure, then, the new corporation would resemble the EOC more than the kind of mayor-driven organization that the original legislation apparently intended. (It was an arrangement similar to what Mayor Shelley had negotiated with MCOR during the debates over urban renewal, but that ultimately failed because the resulting committee would have only had an advisory role.) But this new arrangement gave the MCO the veto power that the neighborhood had long sought. Thus was created the Mission Model Neighborhood Corporation (MMNC). Not unlike the redevelopment agency, the MMNC was formally a private, nonprofit corporation, even though it was in essence a government authority. This authority, however, was constituted at the scale of the neighborhood. Though it was officially an arm of the mayor’s office, the corporation was under the effective control of the MCO, and it had a $3.2 million annual budget with which to operate.17 This arrangement may have made the Mission unique in the nation, a possibility that the corporation’s leaders themselves recognized when the authors of the first annual report wrote that “it is likely that no other model neighborhood has the benefit of such an active and responsive citizen participation.”18 At the peak of its power, in 1970, the MCO involved up to twelve thousand individuals.19 The Mission Housing Development Corporation (MHDC) was created in 1971 to focus on housing programs

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and to handle the federal funding for such programs, but it too was controlled by the MCO. According to Sherry Arnstein’s well-known article from the time, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” there were only a handful of Model Cities corporations that had comparable power, which she would likely have described as “Delegated Power,” if not full “Citizen Control.”20 Considering the authority they possessed, the MMNC and the MHDC had more in common with the community development corporations that were formed around the country in the 1970s than with most Model Cities corporations.21 When the arrangement with city hall was finalized in 1969, the local bilingual paper, New Mission/Nueva Misión, quoted the announcement of the MCO president, Ben Martinez: The program, he said, “would be focused on social aspects rather than just physical aspects. Thus better schools, recreational areas, higher employment, beautified streets, etc. would be the goals. The existing buildings would tend to be rehabilitated rather than torn down.”22 These goals track closely with those set forth in Okamoto/ Liskamm, and in all of the SFRA’s previous publications and statements. The Summary of the Application for Survey Funds, for example, stated that the “Renewal Objectives” were “1) Improved Housing (through rehabilitation and new construction), 2) Jobs, 3) Schools, 4) Parks and Beautification.”23 This identity of goals was perhaps not surprising to city officials, since many of them had regarded urban renewal in the Mission as a test case for Model Cities. The new neighborhood groups described their program as a “coordinated attack” on both social and physical problems, the larger aim of which was to promote the “quality of life” of the Mission.24 These groups viewed the ethnic and economic diversity of the area as a key to that quality of life. Like the settlement-house-affiliated MNC before them, they also viewed that diversity as a principal source of their own strength and as a resource to be defended: The Mission wants to hold onto its color, its fluidity, and its traditional role as Port of Entry for San Francisco. But it also wants to deal with the traditional problems of immigrants and foreign stock—of low-paid, hard working, family-oriented, bluecollar workers—who live within San Francisco, a city with a large population of whitecollar, transient, but frequently unmixed neighborhoods. Its objective is to retain its multi-cultural, multi-ethnic healthy mix of tenants and homeowners, and its easy flow between income and racial groups.25

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Having won veto power over any municipal planning efforts, the MCO no longer viewed city agencies as the main threat to the neighborhood’s ethnic and economic diversity. Rather, the main threat was from the private sector. The MMNC was concerned about “prosperity imposed from the outside”— speculative renovations to the housing stock that would make “the area so stylish and so prosperous that it would become too expensive for the residents that are living there now.”26 It was not only BART that might attract unwanted “outsiders,” but also the neighborhood’s “ethnic diversity and its sense of ‘city.’”27 So while the leaders of the Mission planning coalition viewed the neighborhood’s ethnic diversity as its greatest asset—the source of the its “quality of life”—that high quality of life also posed a problem. If vibrant diversity attracted wealthy newcomers, the basic economics of the housing market suggested that those newcomers would likely destroy the very qualities that had drawn them in the first place. With these goals and worries in mind, it was important for the MMNC to devise an organizational structure that would truly ensure maximum feasible participation. The solution was to create task forces. All of the work of the corporation—the “monitoring, evaluation, and planning” of specific programs—would be conducted by these task forces.28 The primary ones focused on “Manpower and Economic Development, Housing and Physical Development, Education, Social Services (Child Care), Health, Research and Planning.”29 The chairpersons of each task force would be appointed by the MMNC board, but the membership was “open-ended,” meaning that any resident of the Mission Model Neighborhood was invited to participate.30 The task forces also enabled the larger MMNC to groom potential paid employees from the neighborhood. Indeed, it was one of the MMNC’s long-term aims to develop planning expertise within the Mission. The neighborhood groups understood that devising and executing urban plans required more than just the ability to identify challenges; the Mission lacked the “local professional capacity to deal with the complexities of the problems it must face.”31 So in their early years, they would rely on established municipal departments for technical expertise. Upon request from the MMNC, the mayor would direct any relevant agency to assist the neighborhood groups.32 However, over the long term, “an overall objective is to develop as broad a cadre as possible of informed sophisticated citizenry capable of understanding the complexity of the issues they face, and capable of effecting institutional change through participation in the programs.”33 In a general sense, this objective was oriented toward “fostering a ‘self-help, do-it-yourself’ attitude” that would increase the capability of individual residents and groups to, as the MMNC

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put it, “deal with the problems they face rather than merely to complain about their presence and blame others.”34 But in addition to fostering selfreliance among Mission residents as a whole, the neighborhood groups also planned to identify and train Mission residents for professional positions within the MMNC.35 For the leaders of the corporation, self-reliance meant not only the ability to identify issues and lobby on one’s own behalf but, ultimately, to plan, design, and implement programs—relying on external entities only for funding. This position would later become a matter of some contention within the neighborhood. In the meantime, though, the MMNC did not see that it had any choice but to rely on established agencies.

Unlikely Allies: The Collaboration between the MCO and the SFRA With two BART stations already well into the planning stage, the MMNC’s leadership felt a particular urgency around securing technical assistance for small businesses that might need help dealing with the changes that would likely be wrought by the construction.36 But this dependence created a communications problem: the community mobilization against the SFRA was recent memory for Mission residents, but now they were being asked to work with the agency that they had battled only two years ago. As an MMNC report put it, the urban renewal program had “left a suspicion, a sense of distrust, and a sense of ‘apartness’ in the Mission that has made a close working relationship with the City difficult.” For this reason, one of the corporation’s major objectives was “to repair that breach—to establish a climate in which . . . [Mission] residents can work with confidence and trust with the institutions and the government.”37 The MMNC’s strategy for establishing this trust was simply to assure residents that they would “determine the goals, objectives and priorities for programs and projects in their neighborhood through the Citizens Participation structure.”38 The corporation also assured residents that, after the first year of the program, both city and federal agencies had already shown themselves to be helpful and cooperative.39 However, there was only so much that could be accomplished, given the larger circumstances. Though the Mission had succeeded in acquiring an unprecedented formal planning power, the timing of its ascendance guaranteed that practical challenges would be present from the beginning. When Richard Nixon entered the White House in 1969, his administration wasted little time tightening the purse strings on federal funding for

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urban programs, including redevelopment. As soon as the MMNC was up and running, the leadership perceived that not only was its own program underfunded but its partner agencies in municipal government were underfunded. The neighborhood groups now found themselves in the curious position of defending the SFRA against budget cuts. One MMNC report complained that the “Redevelopment Agency, operating under increasingly inadequate federal funding, faces repeated time delays involved in the process of planning and construction of new low to moderate income housing.”40 As recently as 1967, the neighborhood groups had fought tooth and nail against the redevelopment agency’s application for federal funding; now a reduction in SFRA funding could only hurt the neighborhood’s own planning agenda. In spite of these structural challenges, the MCO’s planning agenda moved forward. Programs included a reading clinic, a language and vocational school, a hiring hall, the Mission Childcare Consortium, infant formula distribution, and rodent control, among many others.41 Though the MCO’s leadership was concerned with cultural and social problems, it understood that those were bound up with physical space. Its recommendations about what physical interventions were required track closely with the redevelopment agency’s recommendations—with one obvious exception. Unsurprisingly, the MCO and its affiliates did not move forward with the large clearances around the two BART stations, but this decision did leave the neighborhood with a potential problem: given that the stations would inevitably push up land values in their immediate vicinity, what was to prevent speculators from clearing the land and building highrises that were oriented toward higher socioeconomic strata? The MCO addressed this issue by successfully lobbying the Department of City Planning to downzone Mission Street, imposing height and bulk limitations.42 These limitations, in turn, succeeded in making the speculative redevelopment of the area a losing bet. Here was an example of how the MMNC succeeded in its aims to develop its own expertise and to “Change the Constraints Imposed by Established Institutions.”43 In the end, no buildings surrounding the BART stations were cleared. When the stations themselves were finally built, they would be much better integrated into the surrounding urban fabric, at least in terms of scale, than were any projects in the Western Addition. Each of the stations consisted of two plazas that were situated across Mission Street from each other. The plazas were (and remain at this writing) about 1,000 square feet apiece, each with a subway entrance, a handful of benches, some community-based public art projects, and nothing more. While the redevelopment agency and the neighborhood groups had

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very different ideas about what should happen around the BART stations, that disagreement was by far the most substantial between the two sides. In their diagnosis of the physical challenges facing the Mission, the MCO and its affiliates drew the same conclusions that all of the city’s previous studies had drawn. The MMNC listed “incompatible land use” and “heavy traffic” as the top two problems.44 The Mission-based housing authority, the MHDC, found that 14 percent of the housing units in the Mission required major repairs and that 65 percent required minor repairs, while only 21 percent were sound in their current condition; 10 percent of the housing units actually lacked basic plumbing, while 13 percent were overcrowded.45 While the MMNC was critical of the BART station clearances proposed in the original urban design study, it also cited findings from the same study to support its own conclusions. MMNC reports referred to the redevelopment agency’s study not just for data but also as an authoritative source on the subjective states of Mission residents in relationship to the built environment they inhabited. Like the MMNC after it, the SFRA understood that inadequate services (particularly garbage collection) and general physical deterioration made residents feel like “second class” citizens, leading them to question whether they should stay in the neighborhood.46 To remedy these problems, the neighborhood groups pressured municipal service providers, but they also worked with city agencies on beautification programs, the expansion of parks, and the rehabilitation and expansion of low-income housing stock.47 This last priority required that the neighborhood groups use the tools of redevelopment, particularly eminent domain. Through its affiliates, the MCO made extensive use of spot clearance throughout the district to remove abandoned buildings that might become magnets for squatters.48 An MMNC report estimated that between code enforcement and outright clearance, its own plans would displace 241 families, 160 individuals, and 2 businesses, all of whom would be relocated.49 This would have had a much bigger impact on the Mission than the redevelopment agency had on Diamond Heights; it was probably less disruptive than the Okamoto/Liskamm plan would have been, but not radically so.50 The Mission housing authority acquired land that had hosted a large parking lot, a gas station and repair shop, three residential buildings, and three commercial buildings (two of which likely had housing above storefronts), then cleared everything to build its largest project, the fiftyunit Apartamentos Betel Complex.51 This public housing project illustrated not only the neighborhood groups’ commitment to providing low-income housing but also their ability to collaborate with municipal and even federal agencies.

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In some ways the MMNC and MHDC operated much as the citywide redevelopment agency and planning department did, but a number of features clearly distinguished the more local planning regime from the municipal one. The MCO’s leadership was primarily concerned with programs designed to have direct, material impacts on the conditions of poverty, and it also concerned itself with representational politics in a way that the citywide planning regime did not.

Ethnicity and Representational Politics One of the principal concerns that the neighborhood groups identified was the “limited attention which culture-bearing institutions pay to the ethnic qualities of the Mission.”52 By “culture-bearing institutions,” they meant municipally funded entities like the museums and the symphony. Essentially the leadership of the MMNC felt that these bodies needed to promote cultural identities in the way that the private organizations of the Mission were already doing. Within the neighborhood, “religious services celebrated in the native tongues of immigrant groups serve[d] as a continuation of cultural heritage.”53 The neighborhood centers also promoted the ethnic identity of residents, perhaps most importantly of Latino youth, who were supported in “developing new art forms of graphics and street theaters in order to express cultural themes in relation to contemporary problems.”54 Even the local mass media began recognizing Latinos as an important demographic.55 The city, on the other hand, continued to fund traditional “opera, ballet, symphony, and museums,” amenities that were both economically and culturally inaccessible to most Mission residents.56 If the city’s arts programming failed to reaffirm ethnic identities, the neighborhood groups believed that other municipal agencies were becoming downright hostile to those identities. The public schools did “not reinforce cultural roots; rather, they attempt[ed] to assimilate all children into an Anglo-American way of life.”57 Worse yet were the police, who not only failed to celebrate ethnic identities but often profiled and harassed minority groups.58 The subject of ethnicity divided San Francisco’s planning establishment along familiar lines. Representatives of the social planning regime, like the EOC and HRC, were supportive of the MCO’s plans for cultural programming, while downtown groups were openly concerned about the possible outcomes of reinforcing ethnic identity. In 1961 SPUR had described the Mission as a white neighborhood, even though much of it was more than 50 percent Latino; but the wave of immigration in the 1960s changed

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SPUR’s tune.59 In its 1970 report—titled “Babel in Bagdad [sic] by the Bay: Impact of Immigration on Chinatown and the Mission District”—SPUR recommended strict immigration controls and mandatory English classes, lest San Franciscans “be subjected to a violent lesson in the destructive character of the time-bombs we now know as the ‘quaint’ Mission District and Chinatown.”60 The report drew a direct connection between the reinforcement of ethnic identity and the eruption of urban riots. While SPUR’s leadership apparently supported much of the MCO’s physical planning agenda, its position on cultural matters likely explained the frosty relationship between the two organizations.61 In response to such hostile, assimilationist rhetoric, the neighborhood groups not only lobbied established institutions but also worked to foster new ones, like the Colegio de la Misión. The Colegio, which was staffed by Mission residents, offered thirty-three adult education classes during its first year, classes that were oriented toward the needs and the cultural identities of people from the neighborhood.62 (See fig. 12.2.) The MMNC also supported the Galería de la Raza, a nonprofit arts institution created in 1970.63 The Galería was founded by Chicano artists who were inspired by the Mexican muralist movement, particularly the work of los très grandes: Diego Rivera, José Orozco, and David Siqueiros. The work of los très grandes focused on themes of the Mexican Revolution, the labor movement, and indigenous (particularly Aztec) visual culture. The Mission muralists updated these themes for 1970s San Francisco, and their work began appear-

Figure 12.2. Poster: “Inscribase! El Colegio de la Misión” (Enroll! College of the Mission), 1974. Artist unknown, California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives, Department of Special Collections, Donald Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara.

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ing in public spaces throughout the neighborhood. The Galería de la Raza received Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and Model Cities funds indirectly, through commissions from organizations like the MCO.64 The MMNC also allocated subsidies to be paid directly to the Galería, though it appears that the planned support never materialized due to budget cuts.65 Though the corporation was ultimately unable to support the Galería at the level it had planned to, the intellectual support highlights a shift in the public culture of the Mission, particularly as it concerned the representation of Latinos. While the leadership of the neighborhood had long celebrated the “romance” of its “Spanish past,” the new leadership of the neighborhood celebrated its indigenous and labor heritage. In this new visual economy, the benevolent padre was replaced with Cesar Chavez, the noble savage with a noble unionist, the Christian cross with an Aztec calendar. (Compare fig. 6.4 with color plates 7 and 8.) San Francisco’s downtown-based planning regime had regarded “Spanish,” “Latin,” and even “Mexican” people as close-enough-to-white, provided they did not have “mixed Indian heritage.”66 It was precisely that Indian heritage that the leadership of the MCO now wished to celebrate—while offering a scathing postcolonial critique of the actual Spanish past. Remarkably, the MCO’s survey of the Mission’s architectural heritage failed to even mention the Spanish colonial, focusing instead on Victorian stock, particularly the Queen Anne, stick style, Eastlake, and Italianate variations.67 Given that Spanish colonial architecture was a conspicuous presence in the neighborhood—in commercial, civic, and ecclesiastical buildings, as well as in housing, and of course in the Mission Dolores itself—it seems clear that this omission was not an oversight, but a deliberate marginalization. The neighborhood planning authorities viewed the “Spanish past” much as the Mission muralists did. Advancing a critique that might just as well have been penned by a third-world activist group, the history section of the MHDC’s plan for the neighborhood portrayed the original mission complex as a site of death, disease, and colonialist violence.68 Quoting early nineteenth-century visitors, the plan stated that the “inmates of the mission were in as miserable a condition as it was possible to conceive  .  .  . After several months spent in the missions, they usually begin to grow fretful and thin and they constantly gaze with sadness at the mountains they can see in the distance.”69 For the neighborhood groups, the Spanish past held little “romance,” which helps explain some of their own design decisions. The neighborhood groups’ orientation toward the romantic Spanish past was clearly visible in their interventions in the built environment. The

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most substantial of these was the Apartamentos Betel complex, completed in 1976. The MHDC hired the firm of Burger and Coplans, who employed a postwar Bay Area regionalist style. The design sensibility brought together modernist ideas, like the elimination of ornament, with an emphasis on local traditions and building materials. Showing the influence of regionalist architects like William Wurster and Charles Moore, Betel clearly referenced nearby Victorian housing, in its massing and in details like bay windows, while it also referenced the local craftsman style with the shingle cladding (fig. 12.3). However, the building completely eschewed the Spanish colonial, even though it was arguably the neighborhood’s most prominent design tradition—a tradition that was furthermore a staple of Bay Area regionalism. The Apartamentos Betel seemed to refute, in physical space, the old reclamation narrative. If there was a reclamation under way here, it was not on behalf of the Spanish, but the indigenous. As it turned out, the MCO and affiliated organizations would get few opportunities to express their values in architecture. The most ambitious of the coalition’s housing complexes was to have been the Regal Pale project in the Eastern Mission, named after the abandoned Regal Pale brewery. It was again a project that the SFRA had recommended in 1966.70 The ob-

Figure 12.3. Apartamentos Betel, commissioned by the Mission Housing Development Corporation, designed by the firm of Burger and Coplans, and completed in 1976. The building illustrates the Bay Area regionalist style but eschews the Spanish colonial. Photo by author.

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jective was to “provide sound and attractive housing of low-to-moderate price for residents of the community” by clearing the aging brewery structures, replacing them with new housing, and rehabilitating approximately eight existing housing structures around the periphery of the area.71 An MMNC report estimated that the project would require a federal share of $1,433,537 and a local share of $716,768.72 The project would have created approximately 130 new units of housing.73 A number of circumstances coalesced to halt the Regal Pale plan. In 1970, a series of complex battles emerged within the leadership of the MCO when Ben Martinez decided to run for a third term as president, in spite of the fact that the organization’s bylaws forbade more than two terms.74 As these fights churned in the background, Nixon appointed new HUD officials who did not view low-income housing as the priority that the previous administration had. HUD rejected the initial application for the Regal Pale project on the grounds that there was already sufficient lowincome housing in the area and that more moderate-income housing was needed.75 The neighborhood groups expressed frustration about having the plan rejected; since the project was a collaboration between the Mission’s housing authority, the MHDC, and the SFRA, neighborhood leaders also lamented a lost opportunity to reestablish residents’ trust in the Redevelopment Agency.76 The neighborhood groups planned to continue pushing HUD to approve Regal Pale but were hampered by internal challenges. A power struggle emerged between the leadership of the MMNC and the MCO over the question of whether union factions in the MCO were using Model Cities to provide patronage jobs.77 The struggle was publicized in the local media, undermining both organizations’ credibility as stable agencies.78 Soon after this episode, Nixon summarily cut off Model Cities funding nationwide. By January 1974, the MCO collapsed under the strain of dwindling resources and the expanded internecine battles among the coalition’s many factions.79 When this happened, the MHDC was reassigned to the mayor’s office, and effectively ceased to be a strictly community-controlled organization.80 From that point on, the organization’s activities were severely curtailed by a conservative HUD. The MCO’s accomplishments were modest, but they were achieved in a few short years. By 1973, the MHDC gave “housing rehabilitation assistance to some 450” Mission residents.81 The organization purchased and rehabilitated four existing buildings, which they resold, with subsidized mortgages, as condominiums for low-income residents.82 The neighborhood groups had ambitious plans for “when the present housing morato-

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rium ends,” including increasing “low and moderate income homeownership by at least 4,243 units” through new construction and rehabilitation, guaranteeing low rents, increasing family units, minimizing relocation, and expanding historic preservation programs.83 However, limited by their new political and organizational context, they were only able to “build 101 housing units (39 for elderly), provide house ownership loans to 80 families, and help with the rebuilding of 331 units” by 1980.84 To fully appreciate how the neighborhood planning regime was challenged by a new political and organizational context, it is necessary to consider, in some depth, the changing status of Latinos—and the left-wing critique of those changes.

The Police, Third-World Activism, and the Critique of Liberal Reform By the end of the 1960s, the status of Latinos in San Francisco came to more closely resemble the status of African Americans, a fact that is well illustrated by some community response to the activities of St. Peter’s. Father James Hagan had begun preaching sermons on housing, racial equality, and the Vietnam War; he would also, on occasion, allow his friend Cesar Chavez to deliver sermons.85 St. Peter’s served as an urban base for the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), organizing pickets of the Safeway grocery stores and arranging meetings between the UFW and other San Francisco–based grocery chains. Hagan recalled that for an entire week in the late 1960s there were 500 farmworkers sleeping on the floor of St. Peter’s.86 One woman, who identified herself as a non-Catholic, wrote to St. Peter’s in 1969 to protest the church’s support of the MCO: “These blacks are not nor will they ever be satisfied with anything. It is ironic that our own white decent men are trying to make history in landing on the moon for these trashy specimens. Activism should not be condoned nor abetted. It is wrong to preach liberalism in the churches, it’s bad enough what we have outside of them.” The letter was signed, “A disgusted Decent Individual, Mrs. Bixley.”87 Mrs. Bixley’s statements were notable not only for their virulence but also because she identified as black the membership of a multiethnic organization, with many Anglo members and a predominantly Latino leadership, but with very little African American representation. It was not only Anglos who began comparing Latinos to African Americans in the 1960s. As one elderly Latina put it in 1970, “I believe that the Spanish people is como [like] the colored people. There is discrimination in this country.”88 Latinos came to be regarded by many individuals and

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citywide institutions not as vaguely European but as a distinctly foreign and potentially violent minority. In 1970, SPUR recommended immigration controls and mandatory English classes in order to diffuse the “time bomb” of the Mission.89 As fear over immigration rose, Latinos were compared to African Americans more and more often.90 Members of Mission-based Raza youth groups would soon embrace the comparison, as part of their desire to foster solidarity among oppressed third-world peoples. The frustration of Latino youth was largely born of the fact that they were frequently finding themselves at odds with the school district and the police department. Spanish-speaking students complained of English-only educational policies, tracking, and racist comments from teachers at Mission High.91 One young Latino recalled confronting a high school teacher, John O’Connell, about tracking. O’Connell defended the policies: if students were not differentiated, “he told me I’ll be competing for his son’s job.”92 Racial attitudes in the police department were comparable. Relations between Mission Latinos and the police had been uneventful through the 1950s; whatever tension might have existed was insufficient to attract the attention of the press, at least. By the end of the decade, however, the relationship between the police and all of San Francisco’s minority communities had badly deteriorated. The problems began in the African American neighborhoods, but would soon spread to the Mission. In the early 1960s, the police created a community relations department “to meet the rising pressures of the Civil Rights movement.”93 The Nation reported that the department engaged community-based organizations, participated in social service programs, and was welcomed in San Francisco’s African American neighborhoods. Law enforcement experts around the country regarded the community relations program as a model for police departments in other major cities. But while the department developed a good relationship with minority populations, its relationship with the broader police department was hostile; many of the rank and file referred to it as “the Commie Relations Department.”94 A series of events in 1966 would bring the department to an end. On September 27, an unarmed black teen was shot and killed in Hunters Point, sparking a three-day riot. Chief Thomas Cahill—who was angry with the African American community “after all I did for those people”— withdrew support from the community relations department.95 By 1967, the department was underfunded and staffed with personnel who were antagonistic to the politics of community relations. Over the coming years,

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the relationship between the San Francisco police department and poor minority communities deteriorated further, as incidents with Anglo police officers shooting black residents multiplied.96 Throughout the 1960s Latino youths in the Mission had also complained of police harassment: random stops, warrantless searches, bigoted language, and excessive force. Reports of racism and harassment are difficult to confirm, but are lent credibility by statements of officers who had served in the community relations department. One anonymous former member of the department stated, “Some of the policemen in the San Francisco police department are clear and distinct racists. . . . There are a number of men in the department that I would immediately fire. There are others that I would put in jail because I know what they have done and that is where they belong.”97 The daughter of Joseph Brodnik, an officer who was killed in the Mission, remembered that racism was endemic in the neighborhood station, where many officers felt a personal duty “to bring peace to the Mission where the dirty Latinos are.”98 The reports of police harassment were certainly credible to the editors of the New Mission/Nueva Misión. In 1968, the paper issued a call for a community review board. “We pay taxes to support the finest possible police force. Instead of this we seem to have a head-hunting goon squad here in the Mission. People want police, not bullies. . . . The people in the Sunset [a largely white neighborhood in western San Francisco] don’t have to put up with this treatment.”99 The MMNC reported that the arrest rate among Mission youths was substantially higher than for San Francisco youths as a whole. The result was that there was “little positive communication or cultural identification between Mission residents and the criminal justice system.” Even adults were so suspicious of officers in the neighborhood that they would on occasion shield “minor offenders from the police.”100 In early 1969, a series of events coalesced to push the relations between Mission youths and the police department to a new low. On April 25 the Chronicle police beat reporter, Birney Jarvis (himself a former Hells Angel), published a piece titled “A Gang’s Terror in the Mission.”101 Drawing on an apparently thin source base, the article reported that a “loose knit gang of hoodlums and idlers are slowly closing a fist of fear around the business of a once bustling Mission District neighborhood.”102 Acknowledging a flood of protest, not only from youth advocacy organizations but also from Anglo Mission Street merchants, the next day Jarvis published a follow-up titled “A Defense of Mission Teenagers”; four days later he published an article titled “Merchants Deny Story of Terror.”103 In spite of Jarvis’s clarifica-

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tions, Chief Cahill created a “new super crime prevention unit,” called the Crime Prevention Headquarters Squad, in response to the stories.104 Part of the squad’s mandate was, as Mayor Alioto put it, “to curb the terrorism in the Mission District.”105 It was in this context that, on May 1, 1969, two plainclothes officers named Paul McGoran and Joseph Brodnik stopped three young Latinos who were carrying a television set from a car to a house.106 The young men had been helping a friend move, but the officers regarded the scene as suspicious. The events that followed are known only to the surviving participants, but the result was that Brodnik was shot and killed with his partner’s gun. According to McGoran’s testimony, Brodnik had struck one of the young men in the face immediately after they began questioning them. A scuffle ensued. McGoran claimed that one of the young men took his gun, while the defendants maintained that McGoran accidentally shot Brodnik.107 Arrest warrants were issued for seven young Latinos, including two who had been inside the house and two who were not at the scene at all. What connected the five who were at the scene with the two who were not was their affiliation with the Confederation of Brown Race for Action (COBRA), a third-world defense organization. In its political philosophy COBRA was comparable to the Brown Berets of Southern California, but with a pan-Latino rather than Chicano-Mexican nationalist outlook.108 The Black Panthers provided legal assistance to the seven Latinos, known now as Los Siete de la Raza. The defendants were acquitted in 1971, largely on the strength of testimony demonstrating that McGoran and Brodnik had a history of using excessive force.109 The cause of Los Siete spawned a movement, one that was characterized by a frustration with Great Society liberalism and its focus on self-help and incremental institutional reform. COBRA, its predecessor, was founded by young Latinos who had been affiliated with the Mission Rebels in Action, a youth service organization. Not only were the Rebels founded with Great Society funds through the EOC, they were in fact the best-funded EOC program in the Mission, receiving almost 40 percent more support than OBECA/Arriba Juntos, and more than five times what the Centro Obrero Social received.110 The group that left to form COBRA came to regard the Rebels and many other social service programs as safety valves, ultimately serving to reinforce institutionalized inequities; they began to regard the leadership of those programs as “poverty pimps,” more interested in bringing federal funding to their programs than in effecting social change.111 Fol-

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lowing the lead of the Panthers—and drawing inspiration from the writings of Frantz Fanon, Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, and Karl Marx—COBRA and later Los Siete advanced a critique of the state as an instrument of imperialist oppression. The capitalist state could not, in their view, be reformed; it must be destroyed.112 Los Siete’s critique implicitly aligned with an idea that the Panthers would later call “intercommunalism.”113 In this theory, all of the sites of imperialist oppression around the world were loosely linked in a kind of confederation that must struggle locally for the right of self-determination.114 West Oakland was thusly connected to Chinatown and Watts, but also to the countryside of Vietnam.115 The Mission District was not a part of San Francisco, in this view, nor even of the United States, but was one piece of a global whole, a nation within a nation. The police in the Mission were “an occupying army,” a colonial force in a domestic third-world space.116 Los Siete theorized a community that was founded on solidarity among third-world peoples, including the poor of Vietnam and Latin America who were suffering through wars with Western powers. It was only these third-world peoples who should be empowered to make decisions affecting their own lives, and it was only they who should benefit from the decisions made. As Los Siete’s political philosophy evolved, they began to “see, too, that it can’t just be brown people—it has to be all the oppressed classes—whether they be white or whatever color.”117 These racially egalitarian impulses might be explained in terms of an inherited common sense in the Mission, one rooted in the neighborhood’s labor traditions but refracted through the Catholic church. As Father Hagan recalled, “There were so many people in the neighborhood who enjoyed being with their fellow workers. They had a common sense and dignity about the working person, which was more important than what their country of origin was.” Oral histories conducted in the early 2000s with Mission-based Latino activists support this interpretation. The reason the Bay Area third-world groups had a pan-ethnic orientation, rather than the nationalist orientation prevalent in groups like the Brown Berets in Southern California, is because the Bay Area had a stronger labor tradition than did Los Angeles. A prominent member of Los Siete named Donna Amador recalled, “My mom was in the hotel and Restaurant workers union, and my dad was eventually within the City and Public Employees union as a carpenter. . . . And so that is how I was raised.”118 Harry Bridges—a leader of the 1934 San Francisco General Strike and a president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union—had been an Amador family hero.119 The fact that

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members of a radical group like Los Siete regarded themselves as part of a labor tradition made that group a less disruptive presence among the neighborhood’s existing institutions than it might have been. Still, Los Siete was openly confrontational. As with any other community, real or imagined, membership in Los Siete’s ideal community was not universal. Any people, of whatever race, who espoused the principles of capitalism would not be legitimate members of this community. And since the state was a tool of capital, then the state itself was foreign to the community. The exclusion of the capitalist state from the ideal community was made clear in Los Siete’s comments about the planning efforts of the SFRA and the DCP, efforts that they regarded as “an attack on the Mission by those who measure the worth of a community by the profits they gain from it.”120 In a scene from a documentary by allies of Los Siete, an unnamed commentator spoke specifically to the Mission urban renewal plan. As the Okamoto/Liskamm renderings of the future Twenty-Fourth Street station appeared on screen, the narrator said, “They have a bigger plan defined by the corporate giants: make part of the Mission [into] Wall Street West; build a financial district within the Mission. They intend to move out all the brown people as an unskilled labor class. This is part of a mass extermination of a people.”121 (See fig. 11.1.) Decades hence it is easy to view Los Siete’s revolutionary discourse as either quixotic or criminal, depending on where one’s political sympathies lie, but in any case as overheated. But Los Siete’s rhetoric must be understood within its broader social context, in which political rhetoric surrounding youths of color had reached a pitch on all sides. To announce that the Mission District urban renewal plan was aimed at the “extermination of a people” was exaggerated and inflammatory, but significantly less so than the well-publicized remarks that a judge in nearby Santa Clara County made to a young Mexican man who had pleaded guilty to robbery: “Mexican people feel it’s perfectly all right to go out and act like an animal. . . . We ought to send you out of the country—send you back to Mexico. . . . Maybe Hitler was right. The animals in our society probably ought to be destroyed because they have no right to live among human beings.”122 In light of this 1969 comment, and many comparable remarks, it is easier to understand the 1970 comment about the extermination of a people. For members of Los Siete to call police and civic leaders “pigs” and “imperialists” was no more inflammatory than the Chronicle referring to young Latinos as “terrorists,” or police officers referring to them as “dirty” or as “wetbacks.”123 Indeed it is easy to understand how Los Siete and COBRA viewed their heated discourse as self-defense.

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Los Siete and the MCO To focus only on the rhetoric of Los Siete is to miss the substance of its critique. Amid the charges of fascism and calls to global revolution lay a carefully researched spatial and economic analysis of development politics in San Francisco. In a pamphlet titled “Strictly Ghetto Property,” Los Siete acknowledged that the large clearances had been stopped by a community coalition, but argued that the plans for BART would accomplish the displacement of “brown people” by subtler means.124 The pamphlet argued correctly that immediate postwar transportation planning had been driven by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the Blyth-Zellerbach Committee, and was intended to benefit downtown business interests and suburban commuters. Citing figures and statements from the SFRA and the city planning department, the pamphlet argued that one goal of the BART plan was to convert the Mission into an area of moderately priced housing for downtown office workers. The more moderate MCO had the same analysis, which was part of the reason why it tried to gain control over urban renewal to begin with. But after the dissolution of the coalition in the early 1970s, one of the Mission’s only remaining strategies to forestall speculative displacement was to cultivate a reputation as a neighborhood that was hostile to speculators.125 That work was undoubtedly helped by the existence of third-world defense groups. Like the Panthers across the bay, the activities of Los Siete were not oriented only toward the lofty goal of inspiring a revolution of third-world peoples; they were also grounded in the everyday realities of their neighborhood. Using space donated by St. Peter’s, Los Siete ran a program providing free breakfast to children.126 They also created a free medical clinic and opened a volunteer restaurant called El Basta Ya! (Enough!) in a space on Valencia Street that had once been an Irish saloon.127 Although Los Siete was never opposed to renewing the Mission, it was opposed to urban renewal. That is to say, the group never openly expressed opposition to spot clearance of dilapidated structures, construction of new recreation facilities, development of job training programs, or any of the other activities of the MCO within the neighborhood; rather, Los Siete was suspicious of the idea that such activities should be carried out in partnership with the state. The organization was not interested in climbing Arnstein’s ladder of civic participation; rather, it advocated dismantling the entire structure upon which that ladder rested. Because the MCO was unquestionably community based, the thirdworld activists were a part of the organization; but because the MCO col-

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laborated with the state, and indeed became an unofficial arm of the state, these activists also continually challenged the organization. The most notorious of these challenges was mounted right at the beginning, at the coalition’s founding convention. The Mission Rebels seized the podium before the proceedings began and declared that the MCO was a “phony organization” that was trying to sell out the neighborhood.128 The delegates were apparently unsympathetic to the Rebels’ position—partly because they viewed the challenge as hypocritical, considering that the Rebels themselves were federally funded through the War on Poverty. Even so, it appeared that the Rebels would succeed in breaking the convention apart. The crisis was only averted because a long-distance phone call from Cesar Chavez was put on speaker at that moment. Chavez had been scheduled to deliver the keynote address from a hospital bed, and he spoke movingly on the subject of community solidarity. In Miller’s analysis, the Rebels understood that they had been upstaged, and so reluctantly allowed the convention to proceed.129 Although this was the first such challenge, it would not be the last. Third-world activists alternated between guarded optimism about the work of the MCO and scathing leftist critique. They viewed the organization alternately as a legitimate, if compromised representative of the community, on the one hand, and as a tool of the capitalist state, on the other.130 Accordingly, members of groups like COBRA and later Los Siete would at times collaborate with the MCO, as they did when they supported the Merchants’ campaign against pawnshops, in exchange for their support of the strike at San Francisco State University.131 At other moments, though, the activists might disrupt an MCO meeting, demanding that it be conducted in Spanish.132 Some prominent members of the coalition regarded the constant challenges from the third-world defense constituency as a fundamental cause of the collapse of the MCO. Even people whom Miller described as “militant” left-wing populists, like Rich Sorro, believed that “Latino nationalism” caused the organization to unravel.133

Who Killed the MCO? The demise of the MCO has been the subject of considerable discussion. The established view is that before Nixon cut funding for Model Cities, the coalition was already about to die of self-inflicted wounds.134 This was only partly because of disruptions from the radical left. More fundamental, in this view, were the internal power struggles that were the direct result of the fact that the MCO had become involved in the management of service

The Return to the City within a City / 303

programs. To understand this analysis, it is important to first understand Miller’s vision for what the organization ought to have been. Miller began his 1974 memoir by acknowledging his “own bias”: As a “community organizer” I had certain ideas about how the most effective organization would operate, what it would look like, what its strategy, tactics, and style would be, and so on. Most important for this paper, I thought that such an organization should be an “adversary organization,” serving as the voice of its constituency in relation to various “outside forces,” primarily big business and government.135

In this view, the ultimate purpose of a community-based organization was to reform the larger institutional context. After having successfully challenged the SFRA, the next logical step for the MCO was to continue its challenge of institutional relationships up to higher rungs of authority in the city, state, and even federal governments.136 Accordingly, the organization should not be administering or managing the Model Cities–funded programs. Rather, it should “monitor and evaluate programs and withhold funds when necessary” but devote most of its time and energy attempting to effect reforms to larger institutions.137 For Miller, this was the fundamental criterion by which any community-based organization must be judged; its success was to be measured in terms of its effectiveness in pushing institutional reform as far as possible. Practically, that meant that the programs should not be administered by the MCO, nor by any community-based group created by the MCO, but by institutions that were already in place—institutions like the SFRA and the planning department that already had established capacity and expertise. Ironically, on this point (and likely this point alone) Miller agreed with the assessment of Justin Herman and the leaders of SPUR, all of whom had suggested that neighborhood groups were not expert planners and should not attempt to become experts.138 Miller was suspicious of the aims and especially the political allegiances of city agencies like the SFRA, but he tacitly expressed some faith in those agencies, and—once reformed and closely monitored—in their ability to serve poor neighborhoods. Under the new arrangement with Alioto, the downtown planning regime no longer posed a direct threat to the neighborhood’s aims, because the MCO had veto power and control over the purse strings. So why not use the established capacity? This position was of course directly at odds with the organization’s aim to develop local expertise within the neighborhood. Miller felt compelled

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to speak up on the issue, expressing the view that existing agencies should administer the programs, under the MCO’s supervision. A coalition official, he recounted, “simply shook his head in wonderment, telling me, ‘Mike, that’s just an invitation for downtown to take over the Mission.’”139 But for Miller, this had been precisely the problem with the Mission arm of the EOC: “the internal intrigue of dividing up Poverty Program funds precluded MACABI’s becoming a powerful grassroots organization.”140 So in Miller’s analysis, the MCO guaranteed its own demise as soon as it decided that it would directly control and administer federally funded programs. Well before Nixon cut off funding, the “effective decision-making core of MCO was shrinking rather than expanding. This is a necessary and natural consequence of bureaucratic control of an organization.”141 The categorical nature of this claim invites scrutiny. Perhaps the MCO would have died even without the moratorium on federal funding for urban programs, but there is another possibility that has not received serious consideration, at least not in print: that the steady cutbacks in funding explained the political infighting at least as well as did the decision to directly control programs. After all, Nixon’s moratorium was not enacted until 1973, but the cutbacks began the moment the MMNC was formed. As Miller himself frequently observed, a dwindling of resources often breeds and intensifies internal conflicts.142 Some crucial questions remain unanswered: Is it impossible that the MCO could have survived the infighting, given sufficient resources? To what extent did the slow defunding of the organization nurture the infighting to begin with? These are counterfactual questions, of course, but merely to ask them is to highlight that the established assessment of the MCO has come from a particular perspective, one that carried particular assumptions. Namely, a community-based organization should remain adversarial; its main purpose is to challenge institutional relationships up to ever higher levels of authority; and it should not, therefore, directly manage programs or deliver services. From this perspective, the MCO was ultimately a “failure.”143 However, if the coalition is evaluated in terms of its ability to deliver benefits to its constituents, and to establish itself as the legitimate representative of neighborhood interests, then it must be judged a success, even if that success was short-lived.144 As Miller put it: The MCO was not “that radical group” but the community organization. Whether one liked everything it did or not, it was the organization which represented the Mission. . . . [I]t was the organization recognized by the major public institutions in the City. While some of them sought to go around

The Return to the City within a City / 305 it, and even succeeded on occasion, they did so with the fear that MCO might come after them.145

Most established accounts tell the narrative of a neighborhood group that gained autonomy from municipal authority.146 While the MCO certainly did this, it is important to add in the next breath that it also became a locus of authority. Though it was not itself an official municipal agency, it did control the MMNC and the MHDC, and it effectively controlled policy within the Mission. The MCO succeeded in reestablishing the Mission as a city within a city, an area that would plan for itself.

The Scale of Governance: Neighborhoods and Devolution, 1964–73 Observers from the 1970s to the time of this writing have tended to treat urban renewal and Model Cities in the Mission as a story of a neighborhood wresting power from a city government.147 While that version of events is not wrong, it is incomplete, failing to account for the fact that the city was anxious to give that power away. This policy trajectory was not only illustrated by the work of the new socially oriented municipal agencies; it was part of the rationale for their initial founding. As early as the Christopher administration, city officials had begun to wonder whether neighborhoods ought not possess more authority to govern their own affairs. In the wake of the battles over urban renewal—particularly in the Western Addition— the need for some form of devolution became apparent. The activities of supervisor Jack Morrison illustrate the transformation well. Morrison had been involved with planning in the Mission since the early 1960s, even speaking, on occasion, at MNC events. Morrison had originally voted in favor of the SFRA’s application for federal funding, believing that the neighborhood could effectively, if not officially, control the planning effort. He also voted to approve Alioto’s arrangement giving the MCO two-thirds of the seats on the model neighborhood corporation’s board.148 In the following years, Morrison would become San Francisco’s most vocal champion of devolving many city functions to neighborhoodbased authorities. In 1970, he chaired panel a titled “Can We Decentralize Decision Making?” at San Francisco State University; Ben Martinez, president of the MCO, was one of the panelists.149 In his introductory remarks, Morrison argued that from the 1930s to the 1950s, municipal government had gone too far in centralizing authority—it was an assertion that he believed “would win today almost universal assent.”150

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This was not only the view of citizens and public officials at the municipal level, but also at the state and federal levels. In 1967, the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations—which consisted of officials from all levels of government—“proposed the enactment of state legislation authorizing large cities to establish neighborhood sub-units of government.” The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders and the National Commission on Urban Problems both made similar recommendations.151 Indeed, President Johnson’s loosely defined “Creative Federalism” campaign was predicated on a recognition that some power needed to be devolved.152 This only ten years after the Eisenhower administration had completely omitted neighborhood as a “Comprehensive Planning Unit.”153 As Morrison put it, the question now was not “whether we should decentralize, but rather in what manner and to what degree we should decentralize.”154 Scholars have recently paid much attention to the push, during the 1960s and 1970s, to regionalize governmental functions in order to address problems with transportation infrastructure, water supply, and other issues that failed to respect municipal boundaries. But the push to regionalize governmental functions was part of a larger movement to reexamine all functions of urban governments, assessing whether those functions were best handled by a municipality, state, federal agency, local service district, regional body, or perhaps even a neighborhood-based government. In other words, urban functions need not necessarily be scaled up; some might in fact be scaled down. It was a complex question, as Morrison understood: There are increasing needs felt for regionalization of decision making, especially in the environmental field. You obviously don’t want to decentralize air-pollution control or Bay fill. And so if you decide to decentralize, that decision only brings you to the threshold of the problem. One of the first things you must decide is what is the smallest decision making base that is appropriate to the problem you are concerned with.155

Kent, who would become a champion of metropolitan government, one of the architects of the regional Association of Bay Area Governments, saw the issues much as Morrison did. In fact, Kent believed that once a local government was made to represent a population of more than two hundred thousand, it would “become remote to many of its citizens.”156 This view helps explain his support of the aspirations of neighborhood groups during the urban renewal and Model Cities discussions.

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Morrison offered no specific formulas for how to determine “the smallest decision making base that is appropriate to the problem you are concerned with,” but he did seem to believe that it was primarily problems related to service delivery that ought to be under the purview of neighborhood bodies. That is why he was critical of the fact that Model Cities was tightly controlled by the mayor in Chicago. The same could be said about Houston and Atlanta.157 He was interested in the “little City Halls” experiments, in Boston and Baltimore, but noted that they were essentially mayoral outreach programs rather than governing bodies.158 In San Francisco, Morrison championed district-based supervisorial elections over the atlarge system that had been instituted under Mayor Phelan in 1901. He also supported the MCO and its affiliated organizations, as did Kent, Alioto, the EOC, the HRC, and a host of other prominent actors and agencies. The fact that that the neighborhood-based authorities received so much support from this new social planning regime demonstrates that while the MCO had indeed wrested power from the municipality, it also fulfilled a well-established policy priority: some decision-making power needed to be devolved to the neighborhoods.

Conclusion The Mission District’s encounter with urban renewal has been interpreted as a story of a neighborhood group, motivated by “the search for cultural identity and for political self-reliance,” that achieved “local autonomy” from “heavy-handed political authority.”159 Though that version of events is not wrong, it is incomplete. Language of autonomy and self-determination were important rhetorical tools in organizing the neighborhood coalition, but they do not fully capture the complexity of the MCO’s story.160 The activities of the neighborhood organizations and government authorities were so interwoven in the Mission that it would be difficult to maintain that the former was autonomous from the latter. Indeed, two incarnations of the neighborhood coalition (the MMNC and MHDC) had legal standing as state entities. Ultimately, the Mission’s encounter with urban renewal did not resemble the experience of the Western Addition or Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles or Boston’s West End. Decades of official surveys of the Mission show that the city never envisioned the kind of wholesale clearance visited upon those neighborhoods. The original planning was not imposed by the SFRA or another government agency. Rather, it was requested by the Mission Merchants’ Association, a prominent voice in the neighbor-

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hood throughout the twentieth century, in collaboration with the Mission Neighborhood Center, a settlement-house-affiliated social service agency based in the neighborhood. Together, these entities formed the Greater Mission Citizens’ Council, which consulted extensively with the SFRA and the citywide planning department, and which originally hired the firm of Okamoto/Liskamm to do a preliminary study of the neighborhood. Within city government, the planning effort in the Mission was regarded as an opportunity to make amends for the failures of the Western Addition by involving the community from the beginning in a plan that would emphasize rehabilitation over redevelopment. Many officials, like T. J. Kent, even began to regard the Mission planning effort as a test run for the coming Model Cities program. But by the time the application for federal funding was brought before the Board of Supervisors, a new “informal” leadership had emerged out of the Catholic social service organizations, the Mission arm of the EOC, and tenants’ rights groups.161 In the political tradition that dated back to the Progressive Era, neighborhoods had been represented by improvement clubs and merchants’ associations, so the SFRA and the rest of city government was caught off guard by this new coalition and questioned whether it truly represented the Mission. Even so, the neighborhood coalition supported urban renewal because it believed that the program provided the best tools to revitalize the neighborhood and to defend low-income housing against real estate speculation. It ultimately opposed the SFRA, “with extreme reluctance,” only because the city was unable to grant the coalition veto power.162 Urban renewal gave neighborhood groups a threat to react against. But it also showed them what was possible, if only they could harness state power, thereby giving them a different orientation toward state power. Urban renewal certainly displaced people in the South of Market, the Fillmore, and Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles, but it might also be used as a tool to mitigate market forces, promote affordable housing, and allow a neighborhood to renew on its own terms. In the Mission, the MNC saw this possibility as early as 1961. Under the Model Cities program, the neighborhood coalition was eventually able to win planning power. This was a clear victory for the Mission, but it was also a victory for city government itself, particularly for the newer voices within the government that were represented by the HRC and the EOC. Partly as a reaction against the failings of the city’s early redevelopment projects, and partly in response to the Johnson administration’s loose “Creative Federalism” mandate, many elements of city government were eager to devolve some decision-making power to neighborhoods.

The Return to the City within a City / 309

The MCO provided municipal government a vehicle through which to accomplish this policy priority. Once the MCO acquired planning power, it found itself acting on almost all of the redevelopment agency’s original recommendations, a few large clearances notwithstanding. By 1970, the neighborhood coalition even found itself defending its old adversary—the SFRA—against federal budget cuts. In the short period from its creation in 1968 to the halting of Model Cities funding in 1973, the MCO made strides toward revitalizing the Mission District. It also performed several organizational feats. Reactive, singleissue groups—like those that constituted the freeway revolt—were capable of bringing together diverse interests around a common threat. But to hold diverse interests together around a multi-issue planning agenda was a bigger challenge. More uncommon still was the ability to win formal planning authority for a neighborhood-based group. The MCO succeeded because it was able to leverage and foster the multiethnic solidarity that characterized the postwar Mission. It also succeeded because of its savvy in dealing with governmental institutions, demonstrating a willingness to challenge established agencies but also to collaborate. This disposition allowed the MCO to capitalize on favorable policy environments, like the one that emerged as more voices in city government advocated devolving planning power. Considering all the details of the Mission’s encounter with urban renewal, the story is as much about a neighborhood cooperating with state power as it is about a neighborhood confronting state power. The Mission groups were not autonomous from government authority; rather, they became a locus of authority, along with the municipal, the state, and the federal governments. But this was an authority constituted at a smaller scale, an authority that reestablished the Mission as a city within a city.

CONCLUSION

In the year 2000, the New York Times reported that “because the Mission is the neighborhood of choice for the city’s large array of activist groups, it is not taking its new-found popularity among the wealthy lying down.”1 Sixty years earlier, the Mission Enterprise also declared that “the Mission has never taken anything lying down,” but the article continued by warning that the Mission “will continue the fight against” public housing.2 There are several reasons why it is instructive to consider these pre– and post–World War II quotations next to each other. Both statements describe a defiant pursuit of self-determination, and both declare a desire to protect neighborhood identity. But while there are obvious continuities, there are also striking differences. In 1940, the Mission Merchants and homeowners’ groups were fighting public housing because they were concerned about bringing “the stigma of ‘slum area’ in the Greater Mission District.”3 They were fighting to keep the poorest people out. In 2000, by contrast, Mission groups were fighting to stop new condominium construction, so that they might enable the poor to stay, to survive the most recent boom in real estate speculation. There are many statements going back to the Progressive Era that might similarly be dropped into a twenty-first-century context, with very few adjustments. For example, across the period under study here, observers and residents alike have spoken about what “the Mission wants,” as though the neighborhood was not only a distinct geographical, cultural, and political entity but actually an actor, endowed with its own volition and desires.4 The narrative of the scrappy Mission taking on downtown was also remarkably durable across the twentieth century, even as the demographic and political profiles of the people who cast themselves as “the Mission” changed almost completely. In the 1910s, elites in California state politics, like Matt Sullivan, railed against the scheming interests of downtown in much the

Figure C.1. Top: headquarters of the MPA, constructed in 1908; bottom: the same building in 2013. The old MPA hall has been occupied by Taqueria La Cumbre since the 1960s. MPA, “Constitution and Bylaws,” 1909, Mission Promotion Association file, courtesy of California Historical Society, CHS2013.1277; 2013 photo by author.

Figure C.2. Top: interior of MPA headquarters at 1908 banquet; bottom: interior of the same building in 2013. Where there was once a replica of the Mission Dolores, a monument of Spanish colonialism, there now sits a painting celebrating indigenous identity. Mission District file, photograph collection, courtesy of California Historical Society, CHS2013.1279; 2013 photo by author.

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same way that Los Siete de la Raza did in the 1960s. Today, more than a decade into the twenty-first century, one might substitute “Silicon Valley” for “downtown”—but the sentiments are wholly familiar from the fight over the 1905 Burnham plan through the postwar debates about transportation planning and urban renewal, and across the rest of the century. Ethnicity is another dimension where striking continuities and disjunctures can be observed. For example, the neighborhood has always drawn strength by organizing around a defense of its ethnic identity, but the content of that identity has changed entirely. While local unions and the MPA once explicitly defined the Mission as white, neighborhood groups starting with the MNC sought to defend and leverage the neighborhood’s multiethnicity, and its Latino identity, in particular. We might further observe that a defense of class interests has always been at the center of Missionbased institutions: a safeguarding of middle-class upward mobility in the prewar period, and a defense of the poor in the postwar period. The 1960s witnessed a revival of neighborhood capitalism in the Mission, but it was a different expression of neighborhood capitalism. Progressive Era groups like the MPA and Great Society organizations like the MCO both sought to reorganize the political economy of San Francisco around the interests of neighborhood. But while the early twentieth-century organizations emphasized free enterprise and material advancement, later groups like the MCO envisioned much more of a managed economy—one in which local enterprise would be encouraged, but in which finance and real estate capital would be regulated so as to prevent displacement. Through all of these disjunctures, however, one thing is clear. The Mission has both a strong sense of its own identity and a tendency to organize not just because it “is the neighborhood of choice for  .  .  . activist groups” but because it has a century-long tradition of asserting the right of a neighborhood to plan for itself. Many twenty-first-century observers have pointed to the 1960s mobilization against the SFRA to explain the roots of Mission organizing. But the history is much deeper. There have been many obvious differences among the Mission-based organizations across the twentieth century, but that does not change the fact that the coalitions of the twenty-first-century Mission can trace an unbroken institutional lineage to at least 1906—and probably to the 1890s. To simplify: the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition (formed in 1999) was associated with the Mission Housing Development Corporation (1971), which was created by the Mission Model Neighborhood Corporation (1970), whose board had majority representation from the Mission Coalition Organization (1968), which was a revival of the Mission Council on Redevelopment

Conclusion / 315

(1966), which was funded by the Mission Area Community Action Board, Inc. (1965) and which claimed the membership of the Mission Neighborhood Centers (1958) and the (still-extant) Mission Merchants’ Association (1910), which had taken up the mantle of neighborhood planning from the Mission Promotion Association (1906). St. Peter’s has operated, uninterrupted, since 1867, serving as an institutional link not only to the Mission’s religious history but also to its traditions of venerating the working classes and fighting for neighborhood self-determination. While there are many fine studies of neighborhood-based planning, they tend to focus on a dramatic moment—the fight over a freeway or an urban renewal plan, for example—and so rely on what Garrioch and Peel have called a “before-and-after tableau.”5 The problem is not with any single one of these works but with the collective picture that begins to emerge: Neighborhood groups seem to organize only on an ad hoc basis to fight public housing or a highway or a clearance plan, then dissolve shortly after the battle at hand is won or lost. It is a picture of urban life and urban politics that is at once fragmentary and overly tidy. There are very few scholarly works that treat neighborhoods over extended time periods, even fewer that consider neighborhoods outside the Northeast, and, surprisingly, almost none that engage in a sustained analysis of a neighborhood before and after World War II.6 It is true that neighborhood groups had less power during the Great Depression and the war than in the Progressive Era or in the 1960s, so the focus on those latter periods is understandable. However, to focus exclusively on those moments when planning power was more broadly disbursed is to overlook the fact that neighborhood groups remained important institutional forces, with latent planning energies, throughout the twentieth century. Making the Mission demonstrates that while the Depression and war did facilitate a centralization of power, Catholic parish churches, merchants’ associations, and social service groups continued to ensure that neighborhood mattered—that one’s neighborhood continued to confer a cultural identity and a claim to planning resources. To reestablish that link is to realize that neighborhood-based planning energies were less episodic and reactionary than they were durable, deeply rooted, and broad ranging. But the story told here is about much more than just the Mission. By attending to the longer history of neighborhood-based planning, one must confront a number of apparent anomalies in the historiography of American cities and challenge some assumptions about Progressivism, Latino urban history before World War II, federal home finance agencies, white flight, urban renewal, and the Great Society. It is not that these established

316 / Conclusion

narratives are necessarily wrong, only that they are more local than has so far been appreciated. To fully understand how the planning of American cities has been inflected by the history of class politics or ethnic and race relations or Progressivism, liberalism, neo-liberalism, or conservatism will require many more local studies, particularly studies that look outside of the Northeast and industrial Midwest. Even in the arena of federal urban policy, a compelling national narrative needs to account for the experiences of Denver and Des Moines, Orlando and Oklahoma City. Even San Francisco and Seattle remain understudied. In the absence of such work, any attempt to identify national urban characteristics can ultimately remain only speculative. There are likely hundreds of American neighborhoods with durable and deeply rooted planning traditions. To tell the stories of those neighborhoods will require attention not only to protest groups and departments of city planning but also to local chapters of the PTA, urban homeowners’ associations, rotary clubs, ethnic mutual assistance groups, parish churches, and the many other small-scale social formations that quietly determine not only the texture but also the physical and sociopolitical realities of urban life. Witness the Mission District, a neighborhood that not only underwent tremendous changes throughout the twentieth century, but whose residents and institutions were often responsible for bringing those changes about.

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

After years of working on this project, I am delighted to have the opportunity to thank all of the people and institutions that have helped me along the way. Greig Crysler has read many versions of this manuscript and has influenced its development in countless ways. Paul Groth has shown me that it is often the humblest artifact of the built environment that has the most profound story to tell. David Henkin consistently pushed for conceptual clarity; I always walked away from our conversations with a better understanding of my own work. Many other people have read smaller pieces of this book, in various stages of completion, in connection with conferences and other events. For their comments and encouragement, I wish to thank especially Richard Walker, Eric Avila, Casey Nelson Blake, and Barbara Berglund. Amy Howard offered valuable feedback on my introduction and first chapter. There is a much larger collection of people who have not read this work but nonetheless helped to shape it, in ways large and small, through conversations and by force of example. Though there are too many of them to name here, I must at least acknowledge the influence of Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Paula Fass, Andy Shanken, Mark Brilliant, and Allan Pred. Allan was an early mentor of mine, and I still keenly feel his loss. Elihu Rubin, Sarah Lopez, and Pete Allen helped brainstorm ideas for this book and generally helped shape how I think about urban history. Pete deserves special thanks for assisting me with image wrangling in the Bay Area archives. The University of Oregon has provided material assistance in a number of ways. The color plates in this book were made possible with funding from the Oregon Humanities Center and the Clark Honors College. A Faculty Summer Research Award funded an important trip to the National

318 / Acknowledgments

Archives. A Stanley Greenfield Faculty Award for Library Research Materials provided much-needed access to Sanborn fire insurance maps for the entire West Coast, a resource that has also been a great benefit to my teaching. A New Faculty Award in 2011 helped to defray some of the many costs associated with conducting research. A number of other institutions have also contributed to this book. UC Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Social Change—now known as the Center for Research on Social Change (CRSC)—provided a two-year fellowship, through its New Metropolis Initiative. More importantly, the CRSC created an intellectual community that helped me refine my ideas and develop professionally. I thank Christine Trost, Deborah Lustig, David Minkus, and all the staff and fellows at the CRSC. The University of California’s Labor and Employment Research Fund awarded me a fellowship at a crucial stage of my research. I regret that the fund became a casualty of the recent budget crisis, and I sincerely hope that the state legislature will reconsider the wisdom of slashing funding for research on the history and future of labor in California. A Foreign Language and Area Studies grant from the U.S. Department of Education, as well as a grant from the UC Berkeley Graduate Division, both helped me to refine my Spanish. UC Berkeley’s Department of Architecture also provided intellectual, material, and administrative support. Over the past eight years, I have spent countless hours in archives in the Bay Area and beyond, where I met many dedicated librarians and archivists who gave generously of their time. I thank Jeffrey Burns at the Archive of the Archdiocese of San Francisco for helping me to navigate the collections and for sharing his own research on St. Peter’s Parish in the Mission District. At the California Historical Society, I thank Mary Morganti, Debra Kaufman, and Alison Moore. I also wish to thank the expert staffs at the California State Library, in Sacramento; the California Military History Museum, in Sacramento; the San Francisco History Center, at the San Francisco Public Library; the Labor Archives and Research Center, at San Francisco State University; and the Bancroft Library, at UC Berkeley. At the University of Chicago Press, I thank my editor, Tim Mennel, for skillfully shepherding this project through the long journey from draft to book. My editorial assistant, Nora Devlin, helped me navigate the complexities of preparing a heavily illustrated manuscript. My copy editor, Dru Moorhouse, provided excellent edits. I thank the editors of the Historical Studies of Urban America series: James Grossman, Becky Nicolaides, and Tim Gilfoyle. Tim deserves special mention here. Many years ago, he read a very early, very sketchy draft and immediately saw potential in it. Since

Acknowledgments / 319

then, he has devoted considerable time and energy to the project, offering support and encouragement, as well as consistently insightful suggestions. I also thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments helped me to refine this manuscript. At the University of Oregon, my colleagues in the Honors College and the Department of the History of Art and Architecture have created an inspiring and supportive professional home. I have taught two seminars based on early drafts of this book, and my Honors College and Art History students offered many excellent insights into the project. David Frank and Terry Hunt, the former and current deans of the Honors College, have ensured that I have had the time and resources necessary to engage in serious research. Blake Swanson made the maps, and Zeph Schafer provided research assistance. My colleague Mark Carey has offered good advice, and even better company. Special thanks are due to Dan Rosenberg, who has not only given me excellent comments on this project but has mentored me through the early stages of my career at the University of Oregon. My wife, Thea Chroman, has been with this project from the very beginning. Her patience has never failed to amaze me, and her intelligence and curiosity have never failed to inspire me. Our wonderful son, Silas, makes all of this seem worth it. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my mother, Kathleen Leavitt, and my father, Kip Howell, both of whom set me on this path long ago and have provided unwavering support every step of the way. It is deeply gratifying to know that I have made them proud. I first met Laural Johnson when I was ten years old; she became my stepmother not long after. Laural nurtured my curiosity at crucial moments in my development, and she has continued to support me, in more ways than I can count, for more than thirty years. It is difficult to imagine that I would have found the kind of success and happiness that I have were it not for her influence. I dedicate this work to her, with all my love.

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

N E W S PA P E R S

Call CB Chron. DN EI Exam. LC ME MMN NM/NM NYT OL

San Francisco Call San Francisco Call-Bulletin San Francisco Chronicle San Francisco Daily News El Imparcial San Francisco Examiner Labor Clarion Mission Enterprise Mission Merchants’ News New Mission/Nueva Misión New York Times Organized Labor

N AT I O N A L A R C H I V E S I I , C O L L E G E PA R K , M A R Y L A N D

RG31 RG195 HOLC RG207

Record Group 31, Records of the Federal Housing Administration, 1930–65 Record Group 195, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board Home Owners’ Loan Corporation Record Group 207, General Records of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1931–95

CALIFORNIA COLLECTIONS

AASF Banc.

Archive of the Archdiocese of San Francisco Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley AEL GUC JP MO

Asiatic Exclusion League files “Growing Up in Cities” Collection James Duval Phelan papers M. M. (Michael Maurice) O’Shaughnessy papers

322 / Abbreviations SFLC TK

San Francisco Labor Council files T. J. Kent papers

CHS

California Historical Society JR James Rolph Mayoral papers MPA Mission Promotion Association file PC Photograph Collection PM P. H. McCarthy mayoral papers

SFHC

San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library Mayoral Papers JA Joseph Alioto mayoral papers GC George Christopher mayoral papers ER Elmer Robinson mayoral papers JS John “Jack” Shelley mayoral papers Other Collections FC Freeway Collection JM Jack Morrison papers PR Paul Radin papers VF Vertical Files

UCLA

University of California, Los Angeles CY Charles E. Young Research Library

O R G A N I Z AT I O N S

BART BARTC BARTD BTC DCP EOC FHA FHLBB HOLC HRC HUD MACABI MCO MCOR MHDC MNC MMNC MPA OBECA OEO PWA SERA SFHA SFLC

Bay Area Rapid Transit Bay Area Rapid Transit Commission Bay Area Rapid Transit District Building Trades Council San Francisco Department of City Planning Economic Opportunity Council Federal Housing Administration Federal Home Loan Bank Board Home Owners’ Loan Corporation Human Rights Commission Department of Housing and Urban Development Mission Area Community Action Board, Inc. Mission Coalition Organization Mission Council on Renewal Mission Housing Development Corporation Mission Neighborhood Center Mission Model Neighborhood Corporation Mission Promotion Association Organization for Business Economic and Community Advancement Office of Economic Opportunity Public Works Administration State Emergency Relief Administration San Francisco Housing Authority San Francisco Labor Council

Abbreviations / 323 SFPHA SFRA SPUR USHA WPA

San Francisco Planning and Housing Association San Francisco Redevelopment Agency San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal Association United States Housing Authority Works Progress Administration

NOTES

CHAPTER ONE

1.

All figures from the website of the United States Geological Survey, accessed October 11, 2011, http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/nca/1906/18april/index.php. 2. For an account of the fire from the perspective of a Mission resident, see Dora Landgrebe, “Earthquake, April 18, 1906,” 1966, the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire Digital Collection, CHS. 3. Today the building is known as the Mission Dolores. 4. CB, January 2, 1931; emphasis mine. 5. See Chron., June 7, 1999; October 11, 2013; NYT: January 21, 1999; November 5, 2000; December 14, 2000; November 24, 2013. For recent scholarship addressing the neighborhood’s organizing traditions, see Kelly Jean Freidenfelds, “This Ain’t Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: The Making of the Mission District, San Francisco” (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 2006); and Eduardo Contreras, “The Politics of Community Development: Latinos, Their Neighbors, and the State in San Francisco, 1960s and 1970s” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2008). 6. See, for example, Chron.: “Italian Colony Complete City within a City,” January 6, 1914; “Inside Inn Offers Every Accommodation to Panama-Pacific Exposition Visitors,” January 16, 1914; Howard Hanvey, “The Exposition a City within a City,” March 7, 1915; “City within a City Built by Firestone Co.,” July 22, 1917; “Historic China Town,” November 19, 1917; “Pullman, the Feudal Town, to Disappear,” January 8, 1899; “Review of the Big Paris Fair,” November 17, 1900; “London’s Immense Arena,” January 5, 1908. See also “Story of Havenscourt Is Most Wonderful One of the East Bay,” Call, November 29, 1913; Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1985] 1998), 15; Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 159. 7. James Rolph, quoted in CB, December 29, 1930. 8. Chron.: May 1, 1962; December 5, 1972; MCO, “A Housing Plan for the Mission, Draft,” n.d. [1972], unpaginated, SFHC; Randolph Delehanty, Walks and Tours in the Golden Gate City, San Francisco (New York: Dial Press, 1980), 154; Peter Booth Wiley, National Trust Guide to San Francisco (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000), 303. 9. CB, December 29, 1930. 10. MPA, “Constitution and Bylaws,” 1909, MPA, CHS.

326 / Notes to Pages 5–9 11. Chron.: December 9, 1912; February 19, 1910; March 22, 1910; March 27, 1910. 12. See CB, April 28, 1951; May 14, 1951. 13. “Housing Authority Act Un-American,” ME, May 24, 1940. Also see “Housing Authority Asked to Reconsider the Two Mission Projects,” ME, May 3, 1940. 14. For the Progressive Era, see, for example, Susan Marie Wirka, “The City Social Movement: Progressive Women Reformers and Early Social Planning,” in Planning and the Twentieth-Century American City, ed. Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Joseph Arnold, “The Neighborhood and City Hall: The Origin of Neighborhood Associations in Baltimore, 1880–1911,” Journal of Urban History 6 (1979): 3–30; Alexander von Hoffman, Local Attachments: The Making of an American Neighborhood, 1850–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). For the 1960s and 1970s, see, for example, June Manning Thomas, “Neighborhood Planning: Uses of Oral History,” Journal of Planning History 3 (2004): 50–70; Alexander von Hoffman, House by House, Block by Block: The Rebirth of America’s Urban Neighborhoods (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); William Peterman, Neighborhood Planning and Community-Based Development: The Potential and Limits of Grassroots Action (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000), 2; Geno Baroni, “The Neighborhood Movement in the United States: From the 1960s to the Present,” in Neighborhood Policy and Planning, ed. Phillip Clay and Robert Hollister (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1983). 15. See, for example, von Hoffman, House by House. 16. Fisher’s is the only study to narrate neighborhood planning across this entire period, though each chapter is devoted to a different place. Robert Fisher, Let the People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in America (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984). But see also Patricia Mooney-Melvin, “Before the Neighborhood Organization Revolution: Cincinnati’s Neighborhood Improvement Associations, 1890–1940,” in Making Sense of the City: Local Government, Civic Culture, and Community Life in America, ed. Robert Fairbanks and Patricia Mooney-Melvin (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001); and Michael Austin and Neil Betten, “The Roots of Community Organizing: An Introduction” in The Roots of Community Organizing, 1917–1939, ed. Betten and Austin (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). 17. See, for example, Raymond Mohl, “Stop the Road: Freeway Revolts in American Cities,” Journal of Urban History 30 (2004): 678; Joseph Rodriguez, City against Suburb: The Culture Wars in an American Metropolis (New York: Praeger, 1999); William Issel, “‘Land Values, Human Values, and the Preservation of the City’s Treasured Appearance’: Environmentalism, Politics, and the San Francisco Freeway Revolt,” The Pacific Historical Review 68 (1999): 611–46; John Baranski, “Making Public Housing in San Francisco: Liberalism, Social Prejudice, and Social Activism, 1906–76” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2004). Also see the classics: Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto; and Thomas Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 18. Residents would also occasionally take their planning-related requests directly to the relevant city agency (Parks Department, Board of Education, etc.) or to the board as a whole, but rarely, it seems, to the supervisors who officially represented them. 19. Von Hoffman argues that in Boston, for example, the city council “was usually the place of first resort for those with requests, demands, and complaints for city government.” Von Hoffman, Local Attachments, 182.

Notes to Pages 10–23 / 327 20. For an excellent recent discussion, see Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 21. See Andy Shanken, 194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 125–26. 22. As Manuel Castells has observed, the Mission continued to function as a coherent entity in planning debates largely as a “consequence of a very dense network of community organizations.” Castells, The City and the Grassroots (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 137. 23. “Housing Authority Flayed by Mission District at Hearing,” Exam., May 3, 1940; quoted in Amy Howard, “More than Shelter: Community, Identity, and Spatial Politics in San Francisco Public Housing, 1938–2000,” Ph.D. dissertation (College of William and Mary, 2005), 204. See also “Supervisors’ Vote Opposes Mission Housing Project,” Exam., May 7, 1940; and Baranski, “Making Public Housing,” 125. 24. Mike Miller, “An Organizer’s Tale” (unpublished manuscript, 1974), 125–26. 25. See Rick Butler, The Fillmore, documentary film (San Francisco: KQED, 2001). 26. Tomás Summers Sandoval, Latinos at the Golden Gate: Creating Community and Identity in San Francisco (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 80–81. 27. See William J. Dunne, interview by Frederick Wirt, August 5, 1977, transcript, GUC, Banc., 23; William Bauer, interview by Frederick Wirt, July 26, 1977, transcript, GUC, Banc. See also CB, December 29, 1930. 28. Dunne interview, 1. 29. CB, December 23, 1930. 30. Jessica Sewell, Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San Francisco, 1890–1915 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 47. 31. See, for example, “Mission Wants Playgrounds: Campaign for Open Spaces for Residents of District Is Begun,” Chron., February 13, 1909, 11; Victor Shrader, “Ethnicity, Religion and Class: Progressive School Reform in San Francisco,” History of Education Quarterly 20, no. 4 (Winter 1980): 389; Call, November 15, 1910. 32. See Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 1973); Phoebe Kropp, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 33. These restrictions, or variations thereof, applied in St. Francis Wood, Forest Hill, Forest Hill Extension, Parkside, Ingleside Terraces, Merritt Terrace, West Portal Park, Claremont Court, Westwood Park, and Balboa Terrace. See W. H. Levings, chairman, Central Council West of Twin Peaks, to City Planning Commission, August 27, 1920, box 71, folder 4, JR, CHS. 34. See Steven Bender, Tierra y Libertad: Land, Liberty, and Latino Housing (New York: NYU Press, 2010), 85. 35. “Predominate and Secondary Racial Types by Districts in San Francisco” chart in appendix to “Confidential Report of a Survey for San Francisco,” 1937, Survey of San Francisco no. 2, box 63, HOLC, RG195. 36. See, for example, SPUR, “Babel in Bagdad [sic] by the Bay: Impact of Immigration on Chinatown and the Mission District,” 1970, 7; see also Chester Hartman, City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 65. 37. Judd Kahn titles a book chapter on the Burnham plan “The Defeat of Planning.” See Judd Kahn, Imperial San Francisco: Politics and Planning in an American City, 1897– 1906 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), chap. 8. See also Mansel Black-

328 / Notes to Pages 24–26

38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

46. 47.

ford, The Lost Dream: Businessmen and City Planning on the Pacific Coast: 1890–1920 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993). Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961), 3. Ibid., 438. Ibid., 3, 438. See, for example, Robert Self’s study of a metropolitan region, Louise Nelson Dyble’s study of a multicounty transportation agency, and William Cronon’s groundbreaking study of Chicago and its hinterland. Self, American Babylon; Dyble, Paying the Toll: Local Power, Regional Politics, and the Golden Gate Bridge (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1992). For an analysis of San Francisco and its resource hinterland, see Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). This point has also been made by von Hoffman, Local Attachments, xviii; and by Thomas Jablonsky, Pride in the Jungle: Community and Everyday Life in Back of the Yards Chicago (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 1993, xv. There are some important exceptions to the pattern of treating neighborhoods only at specific moments, or only as containers for other processes. These include studies by Gilbert Osofsky, Thomas Jablonsky, Alexander von Hoffman, Patricia MooneyMelvin, Margaret Garb, Amanda Seligman, and Robin Bachin; but these works focus overwhelmingly on Chicago, and exclusively on the Northeast and industrial Midwest. However, just as ordinary Missionites often defined themselves against “downtown,” ordinary San Franciscans often defined themselves against “the East.” Indeed, many urbanites up and down the West Coast viewed themselves as participants in a cultural contest with cities on the other side of the Rockies. This is the first indication that the many outstanding works on neighborhoods in Chicago, Cincinnati, New York, and Boston are limited in how much they can tell us about the neighborhoods of San Francisco, Portland, or Seattle. See Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, Negro New York, 1890–1930 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); Jablonsky, Pride in the Jungle; von Hoffman, Local Attachments; MooneyMelvin, “Before the Neighborhood Organization Revolution”; Margaret Garb, City of Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Amanda Seligman, Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Robin Bachin, Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago, 1890–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). David Garrioch and Mark Peel, “Introduction: The Social History of Urban Neighborhoods,” Journal of Urban History 32 (July 2006): 663. Self, American Babylon; Mark Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). See Seligman; von Hoffman, Local Attachments; and Jablonsky, Pride in the Jungle. For more on Latinos in Chicago, see Gabriela Arredondo, Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity, and Nation, 1916–39 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008). Also see Lilia Fernandez, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Ruben Hernandez-Leon, Metropolitan Migrants: The Migration of Urban Mexicans to the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Michael Innis-Jimenez, Steel Barrio: The Great

Notes to Pages 26–37 / 329 Mexican Migration to South Chicago, 1915–1940 (New York: New York University Press, 2013). 48. See, most recently, Joel Rast, “Creating a Unified Business Elite: The Origins of the Chicago Central Area Committee,” Journal of Urban History 37 (2011): 583–605. 49. Raphael Sonenshein, Los Angeles: The Structure of a City Government (Los Angeles: League of Women Voters of Los Angeles, 2006), 26; McWilliams, Southern California. C H A P T E R T WO

1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Kahn, Imperial San Francisco: Politics and Planning, 156. For an account of how calls to civic unity accompanied ethnic and class conflict in the aftermath of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, see Karen Sawislak, Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). CB, December 18, 1930. Ibid. Irene Jensen Stark, “Come Walk with Me in My Beautiful Garden of Memory” (unpublished manuscript, 1979–1980), Banc. William Issel and Robert Cherny, San Francisco, 1865–1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 63–64. Sanborn fire insurance map, San Francisco 1899–1900, vol. 2, 1899, sheet 202. This plot was the future site of the Recreation Park baseball stadium, and finally the Valencia Gardens public housing project. Dunne interview, 21. Issel and Cherny, San Francisco, 65. Dunne interview, 21. Joshua Paddison has argued that Irish Catholics were racialized in San Francisco in the postbellum period. It was the anti-Chinese immigration movement of the 1880s that “eclipsed tensions between Catholics and Protestants, creating new coalitions around Christian whiteness rather than broad-based interracial Protestantism.” Paddison, “Anti-Catholicism and Race in Post–Civil War San Francisco,” Pacific Historical Review 78, no. 4 (2009): 505. See Barbara Berglund, Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846–1906 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 10. For a discussion of the relative weakness of anti-Catholic and anti-(white) immigrant groups in San Francisco by the late nineteenth century, see Philip Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 324–26. See Ethington, The Public City, 402. Compare, for example, the figures of James Phelan, the Democratic mayor and U.S. senator, and P. H. McCarthy, the president of the BTC and the Union Labor Party mayor (1910–12). Phelan was a prominent Progressive reformer and McCarthy was a union leader, and both were Irish Catholic. Michael Kazin, Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 22. Ibid. Issel and Cherny, San Francisco, 144. For excellent overviews of San Francisco’s other neighborhoods, see ibid., 58–79. Sanborn fire insurance map, San Francisco 1899–1900, vol. 6, 1900, sheet 636. Issel and Cherny, San Francisco, 64.

330 / Notes to Pages 38–44 20. Chron., May 3, 1962; Roger Lotchin, “John Francis Neylan: San Francisco Irish Progressive,” The San Francisco Irish, 1850–1976 (San Francisco: Irish Literary and Historical Society, 1979), 90. 21. See Sanborn fire insurance maps, San Francisco 1899–1900, vols. 2 and 6. 22. Ibid. 23. CB, December 29, 1930. 24. Ibid. 25. Chron., May 1, 1962; Delehanty, Walks and Tours, 154; Wiley, National Trust Guide, 303. 26. See Dunne interview, 23; and Bauer interview. See also CB, December 29, 1930. 27. “Now laugh, darn you” was a proud taunt that had currency in the early twentieth century; the twenty-first century equivalent might be “What are you going to say about it? Say something!” 28. Dunne interview, 1. 29. Frank Quinn, “Growing Up in the Mission” (unpublished manuscript, 1984), SFHC, 3. 30. CB, December 23, 1930; also see David Wooster Taylor, The Life of James Rolph Jr. (San Francisco: Committee for Publication of the Life of James Rolph Jr., 1934), 50; Chron., December 10, 1912. 31. Kazin, Barons of Labor, 198. 32. CB, December 29, 1930. 33. Call, September 13, 1906. 34. CB, December 29, 1930. 35. Terrence McDonald, The Parameters of Urban Fiscal Policy: Socioeconomic Change and Political Culture in San Francisco, 1860–1906 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 177–80. 36. This was much like the system that prevailed in Chicago, as described in Robin Einhorn, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833–1872 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 37. Alexander Russell, “The Civic League of Improvement Clubs and Associations: Its Origin and History,” Newsletter of the Civic League of Improvement Clubs and Associations of San Francisco, March 1916, 2; McDonald, Parameters, 177. 38. Daily Alta California, June 2, 1888. 39. Ibid. 40. Daily Alta California, February 25, 1887; and March 10, 1889; McDonald, Parameters, 177. 41. McDonald, Parameters, 178. 42. Ibid., 179. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Von Hoffman, 1994, describes a similar trajectory in turn-of-the-century Boston, 185. 46. McDonald, Parameters, 177–80. 47. Chron., April 18, 1896; Call, April 19, 1896. 48. Call, June 12, 1896. 49. Ethington, The Public City, 387; McDonald, Parameters, 96. 50. McDonald, Parameters, 232. 51. Ibid., 216, 234. 52. For an analysis of how this competition looked in Baltimore, see Arnold, “The

Notes to Pages 44–51 / 331

53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

Neighborhood and City Hall”; for Boston see von Hoffman, Local Attachments, 168– 69, and 193–95. For an analysis of how improvement clubs collaborated in Cincinnati, see Mooney-Melvin, “Before the Neighborhood Organization Revolution.” McDonald, Parameters, 224. Ibid., 227. “Another Mission Improvement: Property-Owners Want Dolores Street Made a Boulevard,” Chron., April 23, 1896; “One Park for Another,” Call, May 13, 1896. Also see Page and Turnbull, “Mission Dolores Park: Historic Resource Evaluation,” prepared for San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, 2011. Call, January 22, 1899; Chron., April 13, 1899. McDonald, Parameters, 224. “All the Clubs to Unite,” Call, April 25, 1896. Issel and Cherny, San Francisco, 86–88. Kazin, Barons of Labor, 56; Mel Scott, The San Francisco Bay Area: A Metropolis in Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), 99; Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, 151; Ethington, The Public City, 401; McDonald, Parameters, 97. McDonald, Parameters, especially chap. 8. Ethington, The Public City, 381; Wiley, National Trust Guide, 52. Chron., March 8, 1906. There is some debate among historians over whether Burnham ever used precisely these words, but no one disputes that the sentiment is entirely his. See Thomas Hines, Burnham of Chicago: Architect and Planner, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 401. Daniel H. Burnham, Report on a Plan for San Francisco (San Francisco: Sunset Press, 1905), 80. Willis Polk to the mayor and Board of Supervisors, April 15, 1909; see also Polk to Phelan, October 18, 1911, box 60, folder 19, JP, Banc. CB, January 1, 1931. Ibid.; see also Exam., April 29, 1906; and Chron., April 29, 1906. CB, January 1, 1931 Chron., September 11, 1906. CB, January 2, 1931; emphasis mine. Blackford, The Lost Dream, 46–48. The plan was supported by the Building Trades Council (BTC), which was the driving force behind the Union Labor Party, but other prominent labor factions, like the Seamen’s Union, viewed the push for implementation as a power grab by the Southern Pacific railroad and other large corporations that were represented on the Committee on Reconstruction. See Kahn, Imperial San Francisco: Politics and Planning, 191. Kahn, Imperial San Francisco: Politics and Planning, 184–90. Chron., October 30, 1906. James Walsh, “Abe Ruef Was No Boss: Machine Politics, Reform, and San Francisco,” California Historical Quarterly 51, no. 1 (spring 1972): 3–16 Issel and Cherny, San Francisco, 157 and 173. Kazin, Barons of Labor, chap. 5, especially 114, 130–31. Kahn, Imperial San Francisco: Politics and Planning, 187–98, 212–15. Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, 154; Kahn, Imperial San Francisco: Politics and Planning, 188–89. Kahn and Scott both observe that some resistance came from the Mission, but both

332 / Notes to Pages 51–55

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87. 88. 89.

90. 91. 92.

93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

seem to regard that opposition as relatively unimportant. Kahn, Imperial San Francisco: Politics and Planning, 192; Scott, The San Francisco Bay Area: A Metropolis in Perspective, 116. Call, June 6, 1906; Chron., June 6, 1906. Rolph would later say that the club had been formed some weeks earlier, on May 20, 1906. See CB, January 3, 1931. Call, June 6, 1906; Chron., June 6, 1906. Chron., June 7, 1906. Chron.: June 7, 1906, June 8, 1906. Also see Kahn, Imperial San Francisco: Politics and Planning, 192. Kahn, Imperial San Francisco: Politics and Planning, 52–53. Ibid., 198. Mel Scott’s rendering of this episode, in his classic 1959 study of San Francisco, is problematic. The author begins from a normative position that the Burnham plan should have been enacted, and that Ruef was primarily responsible for its defeat. Scott describes the Ruef amendment in terms that come directly from de Young’s attacks on Ruef in the editorial pages of the Chronicle, ignoring supportive statements that appeared in the Exam. and other journalistic outlets. In de Young’s and Scott’s view, the amendment called for a radical expansion of state power for the real (hidden) purpose of enriching Ruef himself. Judd Kahn’s 1979 Imperial San Francisco: Politics and Planning remains the most careful study of these debates, and Kahn concludes that the amendment ultimately called for only a moderate expansion of power, and would have been relatively difficult for corrupt officials to exploit. Moreover, he determines that there was no way the Burnham plan could have been enacted without the amendment. See Scott, San Francisco Bay Area, chaps. 6 and 7; and Kahn, Imperial San Francisco: Politics and Planning, 180–99, 212. Call: July 21, 1907; July 27, 1907; San Francisco Board of Supervisors, “Journal of Proceedings, Board of Supervisors,” 1907, 344; 1910, 47–48. “Ruef Trial to Go On with New Prosecutors: Hiram Johnson, Matt I. Sullivan and J. J. Dwyer Will Act in Heney’s Place,” Chron., November 15, 1908. Marsden Manson, “Report of Marsden Manson to the Mayor and Committee on Reconstruction,” October 1906, 14, the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire Digital Collection, Banc. Phelan writing in Burnham, Report on a Plan for San Francisco, 208. Kahn, Imperial San Francisco: Politics and Planning, 192. For example, Scott writes that the Civic Center “could be regarded as a partial fulfillment of the city plan prepared in 1905 by Burnham and Bennett, even though the arrangement of the buildings differed radically from that of the original plan.” San Francisco Bay Area, 157. Chron.: April 14, 1909; June 22, 1909; December 10, 1910. Ibid., January 16, 1912. See Smith, The Plan of Chicago, chap. 8. Laura Baker, “Civic Ideals, Mass Culture, and the Public: Reconsidering the 1909 Plan of Chicago,” Journal of Urban History 36 (2010): 750. Ibid., 749. Smith, The Plan of Chicago, 141. David Dunster, “The City as Autodidact: The Chicago Plan of 1909,” Annals of the Architectural Association 23 (summer 1992): 32–38; Baker, “Civic Ideals”; Smith, The Plan of Chicago; Michael McCarthy, “Chicago Businessmen and the Burnham Plan,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 63, no. 3 (1970): 228–56; Samuel Kling,

Notes to Pages 55–64 / 333

100. 101. 102. 103.

“Wide Boulevards, Narrow Visions: Burnham’s Street System and the Chicago Plan Commission, 1909–1930,” Journal of Planning History 12, no. 3 (2013): 245–68. Baker, “Civic Ideals,” 760. Kahn, Imperial San Francisco: Politics and Planning, 198. Baker, “Civic Ideals,” 752. Ibid., 758. CHAPTER THREE

1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

Call, October 21, 1911. At its peak in 1900, the federation was mentioned in 28 Chron. articles. By 1905, that number was 15. By contrast, in its peak year of 1910, the MPA appeared in 141 Chron. articles. MPA, “Constitution and Bylaws,” 1909, 19. The committees were as follows: Executive; Membership; Finance and Auditing; Streets and Sewers; Commercial Development of the Mission; Parks and Playgrounds; Street Railways and Railroad Transportation; Lights and Water Supply; Police and Sanitation; Social; Laws, Ordinances, and Charter Amendments; Press and Publicity; Schools, School Buildings, and Other Public Buildings. MPA, “Constitution and Bylaws,” 1909, 12. MPA, “Constitution and Bylaws,” 1909. MPA, “Picnic Program,” June 20, 1908, unpaginated, MPA, CHS. Kazin, Barons of Labor, 16. Ibid., 152. Ibid., 183. Ethington, The Public City, 414. OL, March 23, 1909. OL, April 13, 1907. Also see “Provide for the Schools,” OL, April 20, 1907. Robert Roos, “Our Duty to Civic Associations,” Newsletter of the Civic League of Improvement Clubs and Associations of San Francisco, March 1916, 7. Ibid., 7. The Mission was not unusual in the fact that its support for improvement cut across class lines. Similar relations prevailed in Boston, for example. See von Hoffman, Local Attachments, 193. See Kazin’s analysis of the McCarthy administration. Kazin, Barons of Labor, chap. 7. The quote comes from von Hoffman, who goes on to argue that members “of the working class and the lower middle class also continued to benefit from and support improvements. Improvements not only bettered living conditions in the less well-off precincts but also provided employment (from contractors or city departments) in an unstable urban economy.” Local Attachments, 192. Call: March 2, 1912; October 21, 1911. Call: May 15, 1910; June 11, 1910; June 29, 1910; May 15, 1910; Chron., July 12, 1910. Call, June 14, 1890; “Mission District French Flats” advertisement, Call, September 12, 1890. By the fall of 1890, the term “Mission District” was being used in the Chron.; see Chron., October 12, 1890. MPA, “Constitution and Bylaws,” 1909; “Mission District Enters Carnival with a Vim Equal to the Portola Revels,” Chron., December 17, 1909. Chron., May 7, 1909. “What Mission Club Has Accomplished,” Call, August 13, 1910. “To Ask Million for Parks in the Mission,” Call, February 12, 1908.

334 / Notes to Pages 64–70 24. Robert Roos, “Club Notes: Mission Promotion Association,” The Improver, August 1912, 11. 25. Call, July 18, 1908. 26. Ibid., July 29, 1911. 27. “Leading Events of Week among Improvement Clubs,” Call, August 5, 1911. 28. Call, July 18, 1908. 29. See, for example, Chron.: January 16, 1909; April 10, 1909; February 11, 1910; January 27, 1912; Call: January 30, 1907; December 7, 1909; January 8, 1910. 30. MPA to SFLC, March 5, 1918, SFLC, carton 12, MPA folder, Banc. 31. Chron.: February 4, 1910; July 24, 1913; Call: June 20, 1910; February 24, 1912. 32. City Beautiful Campaign to Rolph, May 18, 1912, box 71, folder 1, JR, CHS; Exam. with Civic League and MPA, “Map of the Twelve City Beautiful Districts,” n.d. [1912], case D, Map Collection, Earth Science Library, UC Berkeley. 33. Russell, “Civic League,” 2. 34. “All the Clubs to Unite,” Call, April 25, 1896. 35. Ibid. 36. See, for example, “Mission Enjoys a Building Boom: Great Activity in Construction of High Class Structures Is Seen in the District,” Chron., October 21, 1911. 37. Call, December 4, 1909. 38. “Work of the Mission Promotion Association: Pluck, Optimism and Perseverance Are Marked Features of Its Propaganda,” Chron., December 8, 1907. 39. Clipping, “Insurance Bill Higher Than That for City Taxes: MPA Listens to a Startling Array of Facts and Figures,” April 18, 1908, box 8, folder 43, PM, CHS (name of newspaper missing from clipping). Also see Call: September 7, 1907; September 8, 1907; February 12, 1910; Chron., April 10, 1909. 40. Call: September 7, 1907; December 11, 1907. 41. Ibid., August 21, 1907; September 8, 1907. 42. Ibid., September 7, 1907. 43. Chron., Apr 17, 1909. 44. Chron.: September 18, 1909; February 12, 1910; Call: February 12, 1910; March 2, 1912; September 17, 1912; October 5, 1912. 45. Call, October 5, 1912. 46. Ibid., August 6, 1912. 47. MPA to SFLC, May 8, 1918, SFLC, carton 12, MPA folder, Banc.; Chron., May 18, 1918. 48. Call: January 7, 1909; September 29, 1907. 49. Ibid., July 18, 1908; November 19, 1907. 50. Ibid., November 25, 1908. 51. Ibid., September 7, 1907. 52. Ibid., November 18, 1907. 53. Chron., January 21, 1912; Call, September 15 1908. 54. Call: March 15, 1908; January 28, 1909. 55. Chron., October 4, 1908. 56. Call: October 21, 1908; January 28, 1909. 57. Chron.: November 25, 1908; November 1, 1910; Call, November 22, 1908. 58. Ibid. 59. Call: September 11, 1908; September 12, 1908; October 16, 1908. 60. Chron., August 19, 1911; Call, March 2, 1912. 61. Chron., August 19, 1911.

Notes to Pages 70–75 / 335 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

Ibid. Chron., March 22, 1910. See, for example, Call, December 14, 1909. Chron., March 22, 1910. Ibid. Chron.: February 7, 1910; March 22, 1910; March 27, 1910; July 7, 1910; February 19, 1910; March 14, 1911. Chron., October 21, 1911. “What Mission Club Has Accomplished,” Call, August 13, 1910. Ibid. Call, November 15, 1910. Quoted in Shrader, “Ethnicity, Religion and Class,” 389. Von Hoffman has described a similar circumstance in Boston: “Although a sense of neighborhood solidarity muted conflicts over improvements, rivalries between neighborhoods, which had provoked disputes under the old town government, did not abate.” Local Attachments, 196. The Folsom Playground on Twenty-First Street opened in 1920; the Rolph Playground opened on Twenty-Sixth and Potrero in 1923. M. M. O’Shaughnessy, “Improvement of Bernal Cut,” n.d., box 34, folder 17, MO, Banc. As Roger Lotchin has written about San Francisco: “the municipal ownership issue was a carry-over from the Progressive Era, so that the twenties—often considered a reactionary and wasteful interruption in the history of American reform—was in reality just the reverse.” See “John Francis Neylan,” 96–97. Patricia Mooney-Melvin’s research on Cincinnati demonstrates that improvement clubs continued to successfully lobby city government for investment through the 1920s, a period when many historians have assumed that these Progressive neighborhood groups had all but vanished. See Mooney-Melvin, “Before the Neighborhood Organization Revolution,” 95–118. Kazin, Barons of Labor, chap. 7. Roos, “Our Duty to Civic Associations,” 7. Also see von Hoffman, Local Attachments, 192–93. Issel and Cherny, San Francisco, 161–62. Von Hoffman, Local Attachments, 193. Ray Taylor, Hetch Hetchy: The Story of San Francisco’s Struggle to Provide a Water Supply for Her Future Needs (San Francisco: Ricardo Orozco, Publisher, 1926), 29. CB, January 1, 1931. Call: June 16, 1908; August 11, 1908; Chron.: June 16, 1908; July 27, 1912; July 30, 1912. Stephen Sayles, “Hetch Hetchy Reversed: A Rural-Urban Struggle for Power,” California History 64, no. 4 (1985): 254–63; Robert Cherny, “City Commercial, City Beautiful, City Practical: The San Francisco Visions of William C. Ralston, James D. Phelan, and Michael M. O’Shaughnessy,” California History 73, no. 4 (1994–95): 304. CB, January 1, 1931. Chron.: January 21, 1908, November 10, 1908. Also see MPA to SFLC, March 5, 1918, carton 12, MPA folder, SFLC, Banc. R. Taylor, Hetch Hetchy, 121–22. Ibid., 170. MPA, “The Mission’s Big Park,” 1915, broadside, MPA, CHS.

336 / Notes to Pages 76–78 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

99. 100. 101. 102.

103.

104. 105. 106.

Call, February 25, 1912. Roos, “Our Duty to Civic Associations,” 7. Ibid. “Improvement Clubs in Politics,” The Improver, August 1912, 10. “Constitution Amended,” Newsletter of the Civic League of Improvement Clubs and Associations, September 1917, 1. Capitalization original. CB, January 3, 1931. D. O. Crowley to Rolph, January 7, 1924, box 76, folder 14, JR, CHS. See, for example, Edward Delger (for Fair Oaks Parking Association) to Rolph, May 1, 1912; and Secretary for the Mayor to Delger, May 2, 1912, box 71, folder 1, JR, CHS. See Farrar and Carlin to Mayor Rolph, July 3, 1924, box 71, folder 4, JR, CHS. See also City Planning Commission to Mayor Rolph, July 24, 1923; Mayor Rolph to Gus Lachman, July 24, 1923, box 71, folder 4, JR, CHS. George Kelley to Rolph, March 19, 1924, box 76, folder 7, JR, CHS. “Poison in Public Service,” DN, February 26, 1926. “Rolph Linked with Ban on Miss Hagan,” DN, February 25, 1926. Philomene Hagan to Mayor Rolph, February 19, 1926, box 76, folder 15, JR, CHS. See also Hagan to Rolph, February 15, 1926; Rolph to Hagan, February 16, 1926, box 76, folder 15, JR, CHS. See Melvin Cronin to D. O. Crowley, January 27, 1926; Rolph to Cronin, January  29, 1926; Rolph to A. V. Marvier, January 29, 1926; Rolph to Joseph Dryden, February 6, 1926; Rolph to Wallace Bates, February 6, 1926; E. L. Ivy to Rolph, February 20, 1926; box 76, folder 15, JR, CHS. See also “Miss Hagan Says Mayor Asks Ouster,” Exam., February 25, 1926; Chron.: “Secretary of Playgrounds Discharged by Commission,” January 21, 1926; “Mayor Forces Request for Playground Official’s Job,” February 25, 1926. “City Planning Commission” (draft), n.d., box 71, folder 1, JR, CHS. “San Francisco City Planning Ordinance, as adopted March 6, 1914,” 1914, box 71, folder 1, JR, CHS. The best-known works to apply the Progressive/machine dichotomy to San Francisco are Walton Bean’s Boss Ruef’s San Francisco (1952), and Mel Scott’s The San Francisco Bay Area (1959). Both books describe Ruef as an archetypal boss, in the mold of Tammany Hall’s Boss Tweed, and Mayor Eugene Schmitz as his puppet. As James Walsh has shown, however, Ruef was much better understood as a corrupt “impresario” than a boss. Though he had undoubtedly accepted a bribe from the United Railroads, he had no geographic or ethnic base of support, and no control over the Union Labor Party. The influence Ruef exerted was rooted in his personal relationship with Schmitz. Issel and Cherny affirm that the Union Labor Party supervisors did not follow Ruef, or feel themselves beholden to him. It is true that Ruef referred to himself as a boss, but this was more braggadocio than reality. Kazin observes that Bean’s narrative describes the Union Labor Party only from the perspective of its political opponents, even though Ruef’s network of small contractors and minor union officials was “too ad hoc and thinly rooted to call it a ‘machine.’“ The Progressive/machine narrative leads historians to look for fiscally austere reformers and labor-affiliated machine politicians who were profligate with public money, but McDonald shows that it was the Schmitz administration (1902–7) that cut salary expenditures and hewed to a low tax regime, while the Progressive reform administration of James Phelan (1987–1902) increased taxes, bonded indebtedness, and municipal expenditure. Ethington argues that a machine-style Democratic

Notes to Pages 78–85 / 337

107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123.

organization prevailed in San Francisco only between 1882 and 1891, under “boss” Christopher Buckley. But while Buckley’s political organization resembled the archetypal machine, McDonald shows that Buckley, like Schmitz after him, minimized municipal expenditures and kept tax rates and assessed valuations low. It is also worth noting that Scott was a partisan in this matter. He chastised the Schmitz administration for not acting on the Burnham plan, but as a planning consultant who recommended clearing the Western Addition, he was closely associated with the postwar planning regime. See Walton Bean, Boss Ruef’s San Francisco: The Story of the Union Labor Party, Big Business, and the Graft Prosecution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952); John Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 152; Walsh, “Abe Ruef Was No Boss”; Issel and Cherny, San Francisco, 1865–1932, 157 and 173; Kazin, Barons of Labor, chap. 5, especially 114, 130–31; McDonald, Parameters of Urban Fiscal Policy, 97–98 and chaps. 6–8; Ethington, The Public City, 26–27. For an outstanding discussion of the trope of machine politics in Chicago, see Einhorn, Property Rules, chap. 1. McDonald, Parameters of Urban Fiscal Policy, 18. Ibid., 226–33. See Issel and Cherny, San Francisco, 157–58; Kazin, Barons of Labor, 189; and McDonald, Parameters of Urban Fiscal Policy, 211–12, 326 n. 46. Reproduced in Kazin, Barons of Labor, figure 7. Ibid., chap. 7. Labor leaders Thomas Mooney and Warren Billings were convicted of murder, on thin evidence. For more on the bombing and the subsequent trial, see Issel and Cherny, San Francisco, 177–80. Kazin, Barons of Labor, 239. MPA, “MPA Flays Law and Order Committee,” n.d., carton 12, MPA file, SFLC, Banc. Ibid.; see also Lotchin, “John Francis Neylan,” 103. Kazin, Barons of Labor, 243. See, for example, Kahn, Imperial San Francisco: Politics and Planning; Blackford, The Lost Dream; and Scott, San Francisco Bay Area. Smith, The Plan of Chicago, 133. Chron., January 16, 1912. Von Hoffman describes this association as “the leading neighborhood improvement society at the turn of the century.” See von Hoffman, Local Attachments, 194. Ibid. Von Hoffman, Local Attachments, 196–200. See William Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). CHAPTER FOUR

1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

Call: September 12, 1908, September 19, 1908. Ibid., November 19, 1907. John Flynn, President of Seaboard Engineering and Construction Company to MPA, September 28, 1910, box 9, folder 48, PM, CHS; Chron.: May 19, 1909; May 2, 1912; Call: March 18, 1909; October 31, 1910. Chron., October 30, 1908; Call, October 30, 1908. Ibid. Issel and Cherny, San Francisco, 160. Ibid., 161.

338 / Notes to Pages 85–97 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

Kahn, Imperial San Francisco: Politics and Planning, 193. Call, January 10, 1909. Ibid. Berglund, Making San Francisco American, 151; Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, 128–29. DCP, “City within a City: Historic Context Statement for San Francisco’s Mission District,” November 2007, 18. From the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, San Francisco’s principal colonia—known to Anglophones as the “Latin Quarter”—was located miles from the Mission, in the northwestern corner of the city, near Telegraph Hill, where Columbus Street meets Pacific Street. Dorothy Kaucher, James Duval Phelan, A Portrait, 1861–1930 (Saratoga, CA: Montalvo Association, 1982). For a discussion of how mission style architecture at the 1894 Midwinter Exposition in Golden Gate Park served to cast Latin American nations as “decaying and primitive,” see Berglund, Making San Francisco American, 177–78. Bret Harte, Gabriel Conroy: Bohemian Papers, Stories of and for the Young (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1896), 207 and 209. Elizabeth Gray Potter and Mabel Thayer Gray, The Lure of San Francisco: A Romance amid Old Landmarks (San Francisco: P. Elder & Company, 1915), vi. Ibid., 14. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (New York: Routledge, 1993), chap. 3. See also Peter Yorke, “Father Yorke’s Letter in Souvenir Program,” June 21, 1900, St. Peter’s file, Archives of the Archdiocese of San Francisco. Kazin, Barons of Labor, 226. See, for example, Call, March 10, 1909. “Portolá Festival,” pamphlet, [n.d.], box 60, folder 29, JP, Banc. “Mission District Enters Carnival with a Vim Equal to the Portola Revels,” Chron., December 17, 1909. Ibid. Chron., November 29, 1910; Call: December 24, 1909; February 22, 1910. Chron.: May 4, 1909; December 17, 1909; Call, December 13, 1909; Kazin, Barons of Labor, 226. Delehanty, Walks and Tours, 155. Ibid., 159. Chron.: February 14, 1927; May 3, 1962. Richard Longstreth dates the widespread adoption of Spanish architecture to the California Building at 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, but the Mission District did not embrace its Spanish patrimony until after the disaster of 1906. See Longstreth, On the Edge of the World: Four Architects in San Francisco at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), chap. 9; and Kropp, California Vieja, introduction and chap. 1. City of San Francisco, “Municipal Report,” 1915–16, 683. Call, July 18, 1908. For more on the California Building, see Longstreth, On the Edge of the World, chap. 9. For more on the roots of Spanish colonial architecture in Southern California, see Kropp, California Vieja. Call, November 13, 1910. Call: August 9, 1908; August 11, 1908. Call, July 18, 1908. Robert Fogelson, America’s Armories: Architecture, Society, and Public Order (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 85, chap. 3.

Notes to Pages 97–104 / 339 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

Burnham, Report on a Plan for San Francisco, 80. Call, December 31, 1910. Ibid. Call, April 10, 1912. See also Mayor’s Office to McClure, April 1, 1912, box 64, folder 1, JR, CHS. McClure to Mayor’s Office, April 4, 1912, box 64, folder 1, JR, CHS; Call, August 22, 1912; National Park Service, “Nomination to National Register: San Francisco National Guard Armory and Arsenal,” 1978, 5, available at SFHC. Call, August 22, 1912. Ibid. The Call’s jab at the frolicsome nature of service in the National Guard was a little dated by 1914, as the Guard was quickly becoming a professional military force. Ibid. Chron. June 4, 1910. Ibid. Berglund, Making San Francisco American, 13. Kazin, Barons of Labor, 20. Because it was a U.S. colony, the Philippines was not covered by the 1924 Immigration Act. For more on the broader movement, see Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). See Erika Lee, “The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882–1924,” Journal of American Ethnic History 21, no. 3 (2002): 43; Kazin, Barons of Labor, 21. See AEL, “Proceedings of the AEL, San Francisco,” February 1908–August 1910. Anti-Jap Laundry League to SFLC, February 24, 1911, carton 2, Anti-Jap Laundry League folder, SFLC, Banc. Quoted in Kazin, Barons of Labor, 164. “Association Adopts Anti-Japanese Resolution: Mission Promotion Body Favors Expulsion and Exclusion,” Call, June 3, 1909. Anti-Jap Laundry League, “Proceedings of the Second Convention,” 1909, 3, box 1, folder 9, collection no. 20, AEL, Banc. Captain Lamb to Mayor Rolph, September 23, 1924, box 76, folder 8, JR, CHS. Liston Sabraw, “Mayor James Rolph Jr. and the End of the Barbary Coast,” (master’s thesis, San Francisco State University, 1960), 66; Kazin, Barons of Labor, 200. George Shima, “An Appeal to Justice: The Injustice of the Proposed Initiative Measure,” pamphlet, 1920, California Ephemera Collection, CY, UCLA. Jerome Hart, In Our Second Century (San Francisco: Pioneer Press, 1931), 64–75. Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, 156–57, 167–69. See Masao Suzuki, “Important or Impotent? Taking Another Look at the 1920 California Alien Land Law,” Journal of Economic History 64, no. 1 (2004): 125–43. Edwin Ferguson, “The California Alien Land Law and the Fourteenth Amendment,” California Law Review 35, no. 1 (1947): 61–90. Reprinted in Ichiro Mike Murase, “Little Tokyo: One Hundred Years in Pictures,” 1983, Banc. Anti-Jap Laundry League to SFLC, August 2, 1911, carton 2, Anti-Jap Laundry League

340 / Notes to Pages 105–109

64. 65.

66. 67. 68.

folder, SFLC, Banc. See also Anti-Jap Laundry League, “Report for 1911,” 1911, California Ephemera Collection, CY, UCLA. Anti-Jap Laundry League to SFLC, August 2, 1911, carton 2, Anti-Jap Laundry League folder, SFLC, Banc. Lillian Ruth Matthews, “Women in Trade Unions in San Francisco,” vol. 3, issue 1 of University of California Publications in Economics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1913), 95. Anti-Jap Laundry League, “Men and women! Protect your homes from loathsome Oriental diseases!” broadside, 1910, California Ephemera Collection, CY, UCLA. Quoted in Matthews, “Women in Trade Unions,” 96. Anti-Jap Laundry League, “Jap-Laundry Patrons: Attention!” handbill, 1910, California Ephemera Collection, CY, UCLA. The flier reads: Am I acting fair toward my fellow men and women when I patronize a Japanese Laundry in preference to the White Race from whom I earn a livelihood? Should the Japanese invade the industrial field that I depend upon as a means of securing subsistence; what would I think of the white person, who through his or her patronage, assisted the Asiatic in making harder my lot and reducing me and my family to privation? Is it not suicidal policy to encourage, for the sake of saving a few cents per week, Oriental competition that no Caucasian can meet unless he relinquishes those standards of civilization that are the white man’s inheritance upon the white man’s soil? Ask yourself this question! From what race do I depend upon to earn my daily bread—WHITE or JAP? Then how can you patronize the Mongolian while men and women of your own blood are walking the streets in idleness?”

69. Anti-Jap Laundry League, “Men and women!” 70. Ibid. 71. Anti-Jap Laundry League, “In the Interest of Peace with Japan Patronize White Industries Only,” handbill, 1913, California Ephemera Collection, CY, UCLA. 72. Ibid., “Report for 1911,” 1911, California Ephemera Collection, CY, UCLA. 73. Ibid., “Jap-Laundry Patrons: Attention!” handbill, 1910, California Ephemera Collection, CY, UCLA. 74. For a fuller discussion of the gender implications of the protective labor movement, see Arwen Mohun, Steam Laundries: Gender, Technology, and Work in the United States and Great Britain, 1880–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 75. Anti-Jap Laundry League, “Report for 1911.” 76. See Anti-Jap Laundry League to Machinists’ Union, November 8, 1909; League to Emporium Department Store, March 28, 1910; and League to the Southern Pacific, May 7, 1910, carton 2, Anti-Jap Laundry League File, SFLC, Banc. 77. Anti-Jap Laundry League, “Report for 1911.” 78. Bill No. 2551, San Francisco Ordinance No. 2298 (New Series), amending Section No. 4 of Ordinance No. 144. See also LC, August 28, 1914, 16. 79. Anti-Jap Laundry League, “Men and women!” 80. Ibid., “Report for 1911.” 81. The league’s more confrontational tactics were not reserved only for Chinese. On occasion the league also sent threatening letters to Anglo patrons of nonwhite laundries. However, the most menacing tactics were reserved for Asian businesspeople. See Matthews, “Women in Trade Unions,” 35; and Arwen Mohun, Steam Laundries:

Notes to Pages 109–116 / 341

82. 83. 84.

85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93. 94. 95.

96. 97.

98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

Gender, Technology, and Work in the United States and Great Britain, 1880–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 67. Bauer interview, 19. Dunne interview, 18. “This form of gambling,” Quinn explains, “involved marking a thin paper ticker on the surface of which were eighty numbers in Chinese characters. Marking simply meant that you drew a delicate Chinese brush with Chinese ink over each number that you selected. With that done, you brought your ticket to the Chinese gambler who sat behind a table. He took a fresh ticket and duplicated your markings, put the amount you wagered on the upper right-hand side of the ticket below the amount. What these characters meant I never knew but I was told they described the bettor. A ticket would be played for as little as ten cents which made the Chinese lottery popular with working people.” “Growing Up in the Mission,” 34. Ibid., 36. Judging by the 1913–1915 edition of the Sanborn maps, the building that Quinn is likely referring to was located on the corner of Twenty-Fourth Street and Osage Alley, just west of Mission Street. See Sanborn fire insurance map, San Francisco 1913–1915, vol. 6, sheet 595. Quinn, “Growing Up,” 36. Ibid., 33. For a discussion of how assumptions about race and property value were selfreinforcing in Chicago, see Garb, City of Dreams, 193–98. San Francisco Real Estate Board, Bulletin, February 1916, 6. Ibid. W. H. Levings (for Central Council West of Twin Peaks) to City Planning Commission, August 27, 1920, box 71, folder 4, JR, CHS. Other neighborhoods with such covenants were Forest Hill, Forest Hill Extension, Merritt Terrace, West Portal Park, Claremont Court, Westwood Park, and Balboa Terrace. Ibid. See City Planning Commission, “Proposed Zone Plan for San Francisco,” June 1920, 15, box 71, folder 4, JR, CHS. See 1912 photograph of German Savings Bank, Mission District File, Photograph Collection, California Historical Society. During the Progressive Era, the Beaux-Arts was the preferred style of Anglodominated chambers of commerce and commercial clubs in cities across the country. For Chicago, see Carl Smith, The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). For Kansas City, see Wilson, City Beautiful Movement. OL, March 9, 1907. For more on Metropolitan Life tower, see Carol Willis, Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995), 151–52. George Farris, “George W. Farris Diaries, 1879–1910,” August 14, 1906, Banc. See also “Tower of the Metropolitan Life Building, New York,” OL, March 9, 1907. For my quotations of Farris, I have abandoned the convention of using “sic” to note misspellings and grammatical errors for fear of cluttering the quotations. Farris, “Diaries,” August 12, 1906. See also July 14, 1906, and February 24, 1907. Palace and Fairmont advertisement, LC, September 4, 1914. The MPA had a home industry committee, which collaborated with the BTC and the

342 / Notes to Pages 116–124 SFLC on legislative campaigns to protect California industry from eastern manufacturers. See Call: May 15, 1910; June 11, 1910; June 29, 1910; Chron., July 12, 1910. 104. See Mary Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) and Ethington, Public City, especially 41, 408–10. CHAPTER FIVE

1.

David Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 65. 2. Note on terminology: Latino was a term of self-identification that had currency among Spanish-speaking populations during the period under study. When intragroup distinctions become pertinent, particularly along geographical and national dimensions, I adjust my terminology accordingly (e.g., Mexican, South American, etc.). However, given the fragmentary nature of the documentary evidence, the backgrounds of particular groups are not always perfectly clear. In such circumstances, I have opted for the pan-ethnic identification of Latino. 3. Brian Godfrey, Neighborhoods in Transition: The Making of San Francisco’s Ethnic and Nonconformist Communities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 141. Godfrey writes that Latinos settled in the neighborhood “in the 1940s, if not before” but says no more about Latinos in the Mission in the 1930s. Contreras writes that Latino settlement in the Mission “began during the war years.” “Politics of Community Development,” 6. See also City and County of San Francisco Planning Department, “City within a City: Historic Context Statement for San Francisco’s Mission District,” 2007, 86; and Manuel Castells, “Urban Poverty, Ethnic Minorities and Community Organization: The Experience of Neighborhood Mobilization in San Francisco’s Mission District,” in The Castells Reader on Cities and Social Theory, ed. Ida Susser (Malden, MA: Blackwell, [1983] 2002), 139–80. 4. Godfrey, Neighborhoods in Transition, 150. 5. Polk’s Crocker-Langley San Francisco City Directory, 1933. 6. Citing a personal interview, Godfrey states that there was a Latino population in the Northern Mission in the early 1930s, but that it was “greatly outnumbered” by residents of “European stock.” There are reasons to wonder whether this is correct. Not only were there Spanish-language churches and Latino-owned businesses, but by the time the first good data becomes available—with the WPA, “1939 Real Property Survey,” 1939—blocks in the area were well over 50 percent nonwhite. See Godfrey, Neighborhoods in Transition, 148. 7. Polk’s Crocker-Langley San Francisco City Directory, 1933–1942. 8. See Petitioners to Archbishop John Mitty, September 1944, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe Parish file, AASF. 9. Isaura Michell de Rodriquez, interview by Jeffrey Burns, July 17, 1989, transcript, St. Peter’s Parish file, AASF, 11. 10. Father Nichola Farana, interview by Jeffrey Burns, July 7, 1989, transcript, St. Peter’s Parish file, AASF. 11. See, for example, the following Spanish-language advertisements from EI: a cleaners called “Ropa Limpia” (Clean Clothes) at 2450 Harrison Street from November 20, 1931; a free clinic with Spanish-speaking doctors advertising an address on Mission Street between Twenty-First and Twenty-Second Streets (exact address illegible) from November 20, 1931; a dentist in the Anglo Building on Sixteenth Street in the Mission from December 9, 1932; Casa de D. Abraham furniture at 2250 Mission

Notes to Pages 124–126 / 343

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

Street from February 1, 1935; a beauty shop at 1632 Howard Street from August 20, 1938; and Bay City Cleaners, owned by Marcelino Ortega, at 2491 of Folsom Street from August 27, 1938. See, for example, the Anglo Land Company advertisement, “Compra su Hogar!” (Buy Your Home!), EI, December 9, 1932. The advertisement listed three properties in the Mission. Godfrey, Neighborhoods in Transition, 150; Castells, “Urban Poverty,” 140. See advertisement for La Morena, EI, November 20, 1931, giving an address at 1072 Valencia Street, near Twenty-Second Street; and advertisement taken out by Antonio Martinez: “Carpintero, pintor, y empapelador. Ofresco mis servicios a la colonia latina” (“Carpenter, painter, and wall paper hanger. I offer my services to the Latino community”), EI, September 3, 1938. The address given by Martinez was 3322 Twenty-Second Street, around the corner from La Morena Mexican grocery. Summers Sandoval, Latinos at the Golden Gate, 104. To produce the survey, WPA workers conducted a building-to-building canvas of every residential structure in San Francisco, and aggregated the results at the level of the city block. “White, Negro, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, and other races” are listed on the survey forms, but those forms have not been archived; at the block level, results were reported only as white and nonwhite. WPA, “1939 Real Property Survey,” 294. The Eleventh Street Church first appears in the 1933 edition of the Crocker Langley Directory, while the Seventeenth Street Church first appears in the 1937 edition. The “Survey” block numbers are 3520 and 3571b, respectively, from WPA, 1939. WPA, “1939 Real Property Survey,” vol. 2. Compare map 6 with map 7. Ibid., 35. Ignoring residential patterns for a moment, sheer numbers suggest that any randomly selected Latino person in San Francisco was more likely to have been from a Mexican background. Census data reported that in 1930 there were more than twice as many people from Mexican backgrounds living in San Francisco as there were Central and South Americans; the former numbered at “7,900, or 5.1 percent of the total foreign-born population,” while the latter group numbered at 3,200, or “2 percent of the total foreign-born population.” See Godfrey, Neighborhoods in Transition,140. See advertisement for “La Morena,” EI, November 20, 1931. Paul Radin, quoted in “Finding Aid,” 1, PR, SFHC. Ibid. New work has shown that this migration pattern dates back to the nineteenth century. See Summers Sandoval, Latinos at the Golden Gate, 26–27, 91. For data on substandard dwellings, see WPA, “1939 Real Property Survey,” vol. 2, map 3. For data on rentals, see ibid., blocks 149, 159, 158, 3571b, and 3520. A rental on the block that hosted Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe averaged $33.81 a month, while a rental on the block of Eleventh Street that hosted the Baptist “Spanish Mission” was $17.32. No block in the colonia had rents below $25, and no “non-white” block in the Mission had rents as high as $21. See O. A. Morris report on Joe Hernandez, R. V. Armstrong report on Juan Romero, and Theodore Frey report on unnamed Mexican subject, box 2, folder 18, 1933– 1943, PR, SFHC. Godfrey, Neighborhoods in Transition, 140. Ibid., 131.

344 / Notes to Pages 127–133 29. Chron., May 1, 1962. 30. See chap. 4 of the present study. For a discussion of the politics of Spanish colonial architecture in Southern California, see Kropp, California Vieja. 31. “La Exposición de San Diego se Clausura,” La Cronica, January 7, 1917, 4. 32. For Seventeenth Street church, compare 1937 edition of Crocker Langley Directory with identification of the same building in Sanborn fire insurance map, San Francisco 1913–1915, vol. 6, 1914, sheet 549; for Capp Street church, compare 1938 edition of Crocker Langley Directory with identification of the same building in Sanborn fire insurance map, San Francisco 1913–1915, vol. 6, 1914, sheet 596. 33. Josephine Randall, “Character Building Resources: A Study of the Recreational Opportunities and Facilities Provided by Agencies Affiliated with the Community Chest of San Francisco,” 1926, 18. 34. Dominick Twomey interview of unnamed Mexican subject, box 2, folder 18, PR, SFHC. Twomey’s interview notes were handwritten on the back of a letter addressed “To the Bond Holders of San Francisco Elks New Building Association,” January 24, 1933; the Elks are a fraternal order that maintained race restrictions on membership until the 1970s. 35. See also Manuel Gamio, Mexican Immigration to the United States (New York: Dover Publications, 1971 [1930]), 54. 36. O. A. Morris report on Joe Hernandez, box 2, folder 18, PR, SFHC. 37. Ibid. 38. Presto interview with “Miss N.,” box 1, folder 13, PR, SFHC. Summers Sandoval addresses these class and nationality distinctions in nineteenth-century San Francisco. See Latinos at the Golden Gate, 39–40, 54. 39. Unidentified ethnographer’s interview with “Mrs. Monroy,” box 1, folder 13, PR, SFHC. Interviewee’s national origin was not recorded, but Radin filed the report among the Central and South American subjects. 40. D. Taforo interview with unnamed Chilean subject, box 1, folder 13, PR, SFHC. 41. In Gamio’s studies of Mexican immigrants, one of his subjects complained about his Mexican American neighbor’s children: “Those kids were calling my children cholos and other ugly names.” See Manuel Gamio, The Mexican Immigrant: His Life Story (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), 178. 42. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 58. 43. Gamio, Mexican Immigrant, 54. 44. Ibid., 51–56. 45. James Ladd Delkin, Festivals of San Francisco, WPA, 1939, 47. CHAPTER SIX

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Chron., August 10, 1937. Ibid. For more on assessment practices, see HOLC, San Francisco Area Descriptions. WPA, “1939 Real Property Survey,” maps 1, 16. Ibid., maps 4, 21. See Issel and Cherny, San Francisco, 50–57; Scott, San Francisco Bay Area, chaps. 11–14. Issel and Cherny, San Francisco, 50–52. The Oakland Bay Bridge (1936) and the Golden Gate Bridge (1937) were only the most tangible signs of this new cooperative spirit, but the effort could be traced back at least as early as 1925, with the formation of the Regional Plan Association (modeled on the Regional Planning As-

Notes to Pages 133–139 / 345

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

sociation of America, founded by Lewis Mumford and others in New York in 1923). See Scott, San Francisco Bay Area, chap. 12. Issel and Cherny, San Francisco, 50–57. Housing Authority of the City and County of San Francisco, “Eight Annual Report,” 1947, 10. Baranski, “Making Public Housing,” 115. Sanborn fire insurance map, San Francisco 1913–1915, vol. 8, 1914, sheet 772. Gwendolyn Wright, “A Partnership: Catherine Bauer and William Wurster,” in An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster, ed. Marc Treib (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 187. Baranski, “Making Public Housing,” 115–16, 128. “Housing Authority Flayed by Mission District at Hearing,” Exam., May 3, 1940; Howard, “More than Shelter” (2005), 204. See also “Supervisors’ Vote Opposes Mission Housing Project,” Exam., May 7, 1940; and Baranski, “Making Public Housing,” 125. Amy Howard, More than Shelter: Activism and Community in San Francisco Public Housing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), chap. 2 [n.p., uncorrected proofs]. “Housing Authority Act Un-American,” ME, May 24, 1940. Also see “Housing Authority Asked to Reconsider the Two Mission Projects,” ME, May 3, 1940. Baranski, “Making Public Housing,” 128 and 139. Ibid., 129. Howard, More than Shelter (2014), chap. 1. Baranski, “Making Public Housing,” 124; Howard, “More than Shelter” (2005), 27– 28. See also Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 14 and 230. Baranski, “Making Public Housing,” 124. Ibid. See WPA, “1939 Real Property Survey,” block 3571b. Banks v. San Francisco Housing Authority (1953), 120 Cal. App. 2d 1, certiorari denied (1954), 347 U.S. 974. The Valencia Gardens record for September 30, 1954, reported 9 black tenants out of 245 total occupants. The Holly Courts Record for the same date listed 6 blacks out of 117 total tenants. See “Reports on Occupancy, Housing, Assistance Administration,” 1938–1960, box NC3–196–78–5, reel 5, Records of the Public Housing Administration, RG196, NARA II. To ascertain the demographic traits of the tenants of Valencia Gardens, the Historic American Building Survey (HABS) examined the Crocker-Langley Directory between 1953 and 1974—the 1953 directory being the earliest with reverse listings by address, and the 1974 being one of the last. The HABS report concluded that at least one-third of the occupants of the project had Hispanic last names during the entire period under study, and that at least some of those occupants were already there in 1953. HABS, “Valencia Gardens Housing Project,” 2004, 19–20. Wright, “A Partnership,” 187. See Board of Supervisors, “Journal of Proceedings,” January 25, 1943, 185; January 26, 1942, 185. Howard, More than Shelter (2014), chap. 2. SFHA, “Third Annual Report,” 1941, 3. “Promote Beauty: Garden Club Lays Plans for Year,” MMN, November 6, 1941, 1. In 1941, the SFHA reported, “Many who held fantastic ideas concerning the type of persons to be housed and the effect on private property, have become staunch

346 / Notes to Pages 140–149

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

proponents since learning the real purpose and effect of the complete operation. In the vicinity of Holly Courts, this change of sentiment has been particularly marked. A poll was taken among property owners adjacent to this project who were asked to express their ideas concerning the tenants, their children, and the effect on nearby property. The response was overwhelmingly favorable.” SFHA, “Third Annual Report,” 1941, 3. LC, September 3, 1937. Ibid. Samuel Gompers Trades School, “Announcement of Courses,” January 1943, box 52, folder 17, San Francisco Unified School District Records, SFHC. See Willis O’Brien, “Gompers School: A Letter the Education Board Should Have Seen,” Chron. June 6, 1944, 8; Gompers School, “Announcement of Courses,” SFHC. Gompers School, “Announcement of Courses,” 18, SFHC. Ibid., 24. LC, September 3, 1937. Ibid. LC, June 11, 1937. It should be noted that Gompers himself supported strict immigration laws, but regularly supported labor movements in other countries around the world, including in Asia. LC, September 3, 1937. Ibid Delkin, Festivals of San Francisco, 1. “Invites Filipinos to Membership in Union,” LC, March 2, 1934. See, for example, image AAK-0630 in the Historic Photograph Collection, SFHC. This is one of many photos from the 1937 strike to stop WPA layoffs that show nonwhite workers marching alongside white workers. Picket signs read “Join the Workers Alliance: Stop WPA Cuts” and “We Are Striking to Support the Government, NOT Against It!” Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). The murals were painted by twenty-six artists, overseen by Victor Arnautoff. The murals were financed by the Public Works of Art Project. Potter and Gray, The Lure of San Francisco, 14. For more on this argument, see Robert Leighninger, “Cultural Infrastructure: The Legacy of New Deal Public Space,” Journal of Architectural Education 49, no. 4 (1996): 226–36. See California’s Living New Deal project for an overview of the scope of New Dealfunded construction: http://livingnewdeal.berkeley.edu/. The Chinatown project is a sculpture of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen by Beniamino Bufano in St. Mary’s Square. The sculpture, funded by the Federal Art Project, was completed in 1937. CHAPTER SEVEN

1.

C. Lowell Harriss, History and Policies of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1951), 32–33 See also United States Commission on Civil Rights, “Housing: 1961 Civil Rights Housing Report,” 1961, 13; Amy Hillier, “Redlining and the Homeowners’ Loan Corporation,” Journal of Urban History 24 (2003): 394–420; David Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and

Notes to Pages 149–152 / 347

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 111–18. Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 204–5; Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 241. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “Housing Report,” 13. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 203. Ibid., 206. Jackson argues that the housing market was profoundly affected by FHA policies. In 1933, there were 93,000 housing starts nationwide; by 1941, there were 619,000. Between 1934 and 1972, “the percentage of American families living in owneroccupied dwellings rose from 44 percent to 63 percent.” Ibid., 204–5. See also Freund, Colored Property, 120–21. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier; Freund, Colored Property. A forthcoming doctoral dissertation by Judge Glock (Rutgers University) questions whether the FHA did indeed have an anti-urban bias, at least when compared to the private real estate market. The records of the FHA are less useful for several reasons. As Kenneth Jackson put it, the agency was “quite secretive” about the specifics of the loans it backed. What’s more, the records that are available—RG31 at the National Archives in College Park, MD—enjoy a well-deserved reputation for intellectual inaccessibility. While those records are extensive, they are disorganized and incomplete. See Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 209. Also see Light’s brief discussion of FHA records in Jennifer Light, “Nationality and Neighborhood Risk at the Origins of FHA Underwriting, Journal of Urban History 36 (2010): 634–71. Hillier, “Redlining,” 394. See Hillier, “Redlining.” HOLC, San Francisco Area Descriptions, 2. HOLC, “Manual of Instruction for Appraisers,” n.d., box 20, Correspondence of Chairman John H. Fahey, 1940–1947, RG195. HOLC, San Francisco Area Descriptions, 2. Emphasis original. Ibid., 3. Ibid. Hillier, “Redlining,” 395. See also Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 197; Raymond A. Mohl and Neil Betten, Steel City: Urban and Ethnic Patterns in Gary, Indiana, 1906– 1950 (Teaneck, NJ: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1986). Hillier, “Redlining,” 395. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The quote comes from a Douglas Massey essay that gives only a gloss of the HOLC: “Origins of Economic Disparities: The Historical Role of Housing Segregation,” in Segregation: The Rising Costs for America, ed. James Carr and Nandinee Kutty (New York: Routledge, 2008), 69. The city survey of San Francisco states that the HOLC made 2,086 loans in that city, but does not indicate how that number broke down by residential security grade. Portland is the only city in the area encompassing Northern California and the Pacific Northwest for which the city survey reported how the loans were distributed by security grade. The average D area in Portland received 62.2 loans; the average C area received 57.7; the average B area received 44.9 loans, while the average A area received only 14.5 loans. In raw numbers, the corporation gave the most loans in C, or yellow-graded

348 / Notes to Pages 152–153

22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

areas, where it made 2,078 total loans among thirty-six areas. HOLC gave the next highest amount in B, or blue areas: 1,302 loans in twenty-nine areas. D, or red areas, ranked third in raw numbers—560 loans among nine areas—and the fewest loans were given in A, or green areas: 229 loans in sixteen total areas. Though B, or blue-lined areas, did receive more loans, in raw numbers, than redlined areas, it is important to remember that there were more than three times as many blue-lined areas. Proportionally speaking, lower-graded areas received more loans. Portland is the only city in the area encompassing Northern California and the Pacific Northwest for which the HOLC reported where it made loans. HOLC, “Security Area Descriptions, Portland, OR,” 1938, Portland, OR, box 26, RG195. Area D-3. HOLC, Portland Area Descriptions, D-3. Hillier, “Redlining,” 397; Cohen, Making a New Deal, 274; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 202. In 1975, the Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics, at UC Berkeley, wrote that HOLC’s “central criterion used to classify an area as ‘hazardous’ for home loans was the proportion of ‘undesirable population.’” Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics, “What Is Redlining?,” UC Berkeley, 1975, 1. Hillier, “Redlining.” Amy Hillier, “Who Received Loans? Home Owners’ Loan Corporation Lending and Discrimination in Philadelphia in the 1930s,” Journal of Planning History 2, no. 1 (2003): 13. Freund, Colored Property, 117–18; Hillier, “Who Received Loans,” 13. See especially Cohen, Making a New Deal, 276; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 203; and Freund, Colored Property, 111–18. See Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, and Freund, Colored Property. Hillier, “Redlining,” 400. Bowden to Fergus, December 8, 1936, and Bowden to Fergus, December 1, 1936, HOLC General Correspondence, RG195. Bowden to Fergus, December 1, 1936, HOLC General Correspondence, RG195. Ibid., December 8, 1936. Mohl and Betten’s study of Gary, Indiana, suggests that HOLC appraisers were “usually local bankers and real estate men.” Steel City, 67. Not only did Bowden collaborate closely with local mortgage institutions, but he apparently enjoyed some perquisites in connection with those collaborations. Writing to a superior in Washington, Bowden noted, “I have had some pretty good breaks on getting around and doing area descriptions in San Francisco. I have a friend here who is somewhat of a ‘nabob,’ and he placed not only his car but his chauffeur at my disposal for a day.” A. P. Giannini, founder of the Bank of America, wrote letters of introduction for Bowden as he went off to survey other cities. See Bowden to Fergus, December 1, 1936; Bowden to C. C. Boyd, December 8, 1936; Bowden to Boyd, October 29, 1936, HOLC General Correspondence, RG195. Bowden to Corwin Fergus, July 13, 1936, box 42, roll 470, HOLC General Administrative Correspondence, San Francisco Region, RG195. See also Bowden to Fergus, June 30, 1936; Fergus to Bowden, May 12, 1936; Bowden to Fergus, May 6, 1936. In support of the thesis that local lenders had access to the HOLC maps, Jackson points to the fact that the city surveys contain interviews with major local lending institutions, in which the lenders refer to A, B, C, and D areas, and Green, Blue, Yellow, and Red areas. Considering this evidence, Hillier writes that “it was field agents, not the lenders themselves, who wrote up the answers from the survey, so

Notes to Pages 153–154 / 349

38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

it is possible that the grades and colors were the field agents’ shorthand rather than the literal answers provided by the lenders.” See Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 203; and Hillier, “Redlining,” 401. The interview goes on for several more lines of text to detail where the bank would and would not lend, all referencing areas that appear on the residential security map. Many of the other interviews with officials of lending institutions also make explicit reference to the residential security map of San Francisco, “submitted for our inspection.” See interviews with William Arnold, and with J. O. Tobin, Hibernia Savings and Loan Society, in HOLC, Confidential Report for San Francisco, 53-A, 80-A. In this light, the FHLBB’s concern about allowing the residential security maps to “fall into private hands” is puzzling. Which private hands were the board concerned about? If every substantial lender in town had studied the maps, and the largest and most important of those lenders had helped create the maps, who was left to hide them from? Since local lending institutions reported detailed financial information to the HOLC, the corporation was sensitive about keeping confidential the section of each survey that provided local mortgage-market analysis; but that does not explain why the associated maps should be kept confidential. Perhaps the FHLBB was more concerned about the press than about lending institutions. It is also probable that HOLC operatives simply ignored this guideline. Whatever the case, in San Francisco and Oakland it is clear that these maps were not kept out of private hands; indeed, private hands drew the lines. See Bowden to Corwin Fergus, July 13, 1936, HOLC General Correspondence, RG195. Hillier, “Redlining,” 402. Ibid. Ibid., 404. Another source suggests that there were at least ten HOLC employees who worked only on appraisals for outside agencies. See N. B. Greenwood to John Hager, June 15, 1943; Asa Groves to Charles Cotter, August 11, 1943; and Groves to Cotter, June 8, 1943; Fahey Correspondence, RG195. The outside federal agencies for which the HOLC performed appraisals were the Navy Department, War Department, Department of Justice, Federal Works Agency, Public Roads Administration, Public Buildings Administration, Treasury Department, Office of Price Administration, United States Maritime Commission, Federal Public Housing Authority, Alien Property Custodian, Federal Communications Commission, United States Coast Guard, Smaller War Plants Corporation, and the War Shipping Administration. See John Fahey to John Blandford, October 12, 1944; K. C. Borregard to Fahey, October 7, 1944; D. H. McNeal to Mr. Loomis, August 16, 1941; “Operations of the Washington HOLC Office, as of February 20, 1942”; Fahey Correspondence, RG195. Borregard to Fahey, October 7, 1944, Fahey Correspondence, RG195. Philip Kniskern, “Memorandum with Reference to State Appraisal Advisors,” April 27, 1934, Fahey Correspondence, RG195. Fahey to Governor Twohy, September 7, 1944; R. C. Rush to Charles Cotter, August 15, 1944; Fahey Correspondence, RG195. HOLC’s interviews with local lenders frequently expressed concern about FHA practices. For example, an official from the San Francisco Bank stated that the “FHA is inclined to be too liberal in its appraisals.” See HOLC, Confidential Report for San Francisco, 70-A, 73-A, 78, 86–92, and 47. For more on the HOLC’s concern about

350 / Notes to Pages 155–157

49.

50. 51.

52. 53.

54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

59.

60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70.

whether the FHA inflated its appraisals, see Rush to Cotter, August 15, 1944; Fahey to Cotter, March 8, 1944; Fahey Correspondence, RG195. Bowden to Boyd, December 8, 1936, HOLC General Correspondence, RG195. In 1944, this rivalry was alive and well, prompting John Fahey, chairman of the FHLBB, to write that the “HOLC appraisal system was developed with the aid of the best experts in the country long before the FHA did anything of the kind.” Strictly speaking, Fahey’s statement is probably inaccurate, but he is likely suggesting that the HOLC was the first to roll out a systematic and rigorous system across the country. Twohey, September 7, 1944, Fahey Correspondence, RG195. Groves to Cotter, May 26, 1943, Fahey Correspondence, RG195. HOLC, “Description of Areas of Spokane, WA,” 1938, 4, box 143, RG195; HOLC, Portland Area Descriptions, 9; Bowden to Fergus, December 1, 1936, HOLC General Correspondence, RG195. HOLC, Portland Area Descriptions, 9. See “Reconditioning Operations Chart,” in John Hager to Fahey, June 12, 1941; Hager to Fahey, December 10, 1940; McNeal to Mr. Loomis, August 16, 1941; Fahey Correspondence, RG195. HOLC made $80 million in such loans, Harriss, History and Policies, 130 and chap. 8. “Operations of the Washington HOLC Office, as of February 20, 1942,” Fahey Correspondence, RG195. Alexander von Hoffman, “Enter the Housing Industry, Stage Right: A Working Paper on the History of Housing Policy,” Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University, 2008, 18. Ibid. Hillier cites only Washington and Baltimore, but a 1941 report of the FHLBB also mentions Chicago. FHLBB, “Report of the FHLBB, 1941,” 158. McNeal, to Office of the General Manager, February 29, 1940, Fahey Correspondence, RG195. Also see FHLBB, “Waverly: A Study in Neighborhood Conservation,” 1940, 16. Amy Hillier, “Residential Security Maps and Neighborhood Appraisals: The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and the Case of Philadelphia,” Social Science History 29, no. 2 (2005): 210. See Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), chap. 2; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 203–18; Freund, Colored Property, 118–35. FHA, “The FHA Story, in Summary,” 1959, 8. FHA, “The Story of the FHA,” 9; Wright, Building the Dream, 241–42. HOLC, Confidential Report for San Francisco, 86. Ibid. Ibid Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 10. See Douglas Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 351; and Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 193. The San Francisco areas redlined because of race were D-1 and D-3. HOLC, San Francisco Area Descriptions, 4. The three redlined areas that were described as being under threat of racial infiltration were D-2, D-4, and D-8. Ibid., D-15.

Notes to Pages 157–161 / 351 71. Ibid., D-13. 72. Ibid., 4. 73. Cohen, Making a New Deal, 276. For more on HOLC redlining of Italian neighborhoods in Chicago, see Thomas Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 164. 74. HOLC, San Francisco Area Descriptions, B-12. The only white ethnic group that was sometimes singled out as subversive was Russian, and that because of fears of Communist affiliation. See description of “red Russians” in Potrero Hill, Area D-15. 75. HOLC, San Francisco Area Descriptions, D-5. 76. Ibid. 77. Quoted in Light, “FHA Underwriting,” 660. 78. Bowden to Boyd, December 8, 1936, HOLC General Correspondence, RG195. 79. HOLC, San Francisco Area Descriptions, 3. For elaboration on HOLC operatives’ ideas about how mixed use affected land value, see “Depreciation Factors and Substantiating Evidence,” in Fahey to Mr. Moore, January 27, 1945, 4, Fahey Correspondence, RG195. 80. HOLC, San Francisco Area Descriptions, 3. 81. See HOLC, “Confidential Report of a Study for Portland, Oregon,” 1938, 7, box 25, RG195. 82. HOLC, San Francisco Area Descriptions, 18. 83. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 200. 84. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 44. 85. In Portland, areas C-11 and C-16 contained twenty or more families of “Negroes or Orientals,” while areas C-10, C-21, C-22, C-28, C-29, C-30, and C-32 contained between five and twenty families. Area B-13 and eight other C-rated areas had between one and five families. See also HOLC, Portland Area Descriptions, 6. The HOLC report for Spokane stated that “isolated negro families reside in many of the third grade areas.” HOLC, Spokane Area Descriptions, 5. In Tacoma, by contrast, even the presence of “three highly respected Negro families” was sufficient grounds to redline a neighborhood. See HOLC, “Description of Areas of Tacoma, WA,” 1938, Area D-1, box 143 RG195. 86. HOLC, “Confidential Report of a Study for Seattle, Washington,” 1938, 7, box 25, RG195. 87. The area referred to is composed of “the south part of D-5 and the north part of C-13.” HOLC, Seattle Area Descriptions, 8. 88. Homer Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933), 442. 89. Light, “FHA Underwriting,” 651. 90. Quoted in Light, “FHA Underwriting,” 660. Also see Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 35. 91. Quoted in Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven, 193. 92. HOLC, Confidential Report for San Francisco, 2. 93. HOLC, San Francisco Area Descriptions, 4. 94. “Predominate and Secondary Racial Types by Districts in San Francisco” chart, in “Appendix to San Francisco Survey Report,” HOLC, Confidential Report for San Francisco. 95. HOLC, San Francisco Area Descriptions, D-3. 96. The eastern-most parts of C-25 and C-26 fell within the Mission District; all but the

352 / Notes to Pages 161–165

97.

98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

108. 109.

110.

111. 112.

southern-most tip of D-8 was in the neighborhood, and D-12 was entirely within the Mission. HOLC, San Francisco Area Descriptions, D-12. The D-8 description noted that singlefamily houses “varied in types of architecture and construction,” and that “multifamily dwellings, flats and apartments abound throughout the area, and that part lying north of 18th Street might almost be classed ‘commercial’ as it contains but few single-family dwellings and a large percentage is given over to business: many shops, markets, and stores, and even a few semi-industrial establishments being located here.” HOLC, San Francisco Area Descriptions, D-8, D-12, C-25, and C-26. Ibid., D-12. J. W. Villalon interview with “Mr. V,” box 2, folder 18, PR, SFHC. Summers Sandoval, Latinos at the Golden Gate, 34–35. Laura Gomez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (New York: NYU Press, 2008), 149. See for example the Anglo Land Company advertisement, “Compra su Hogar!” (Buy Your Home!), EI, December 9, 1932. HOLC, San Francisco Area Descriptions. Bank of America advertisement: “Préstamos para Residencias” (Loans for Residences), EI, February 1, 1935, 4. HOLC, San Francisco Area Descriptions, D-8. Abraham Hoffman, Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1929–1939 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974), 59–63; Kropp, California Vieja, 231–32. HOLC, Seattle Area Descriptions, D-5. HOLC, “Special Explanation, Portland, Oregon,” 1938, 7, box 26, RG195. For more on Bowden’s apparent lack of respect for local racial attitudes in Portland, see HOLC, Confidential Report for Portland, 1938, 58, box 25, RG195. Fergus to Bowden, December 4, 1936, HOLC General Correspondence, RG195. HOLC officials and local bankers in San Francisco criticized the FHA for their lack of uniformity. See HOLC, Confidential Report for San Francisco, 87. The HOLC surveys varied not only in terms of how the corporation applied its standards, but also in terms of the format of the reports themselves. In Portland, Tacoma, and Spokane, the area descriptions appear on a form with sections for area characteristics, inhabitants, buildings, availability of mortgage funds, and clarifying remarks. The narrative of each area was typically only three or four lines. In Seattle and San Francisco, area descriptions are only in narrative, with no associated form. The descriptions of Seattle areas are typically between three to five sentences, and contain little of the information that appears on the forms used in other cities, while San Francisco area descriptions often occupy an entire page and systematically report the same information found on the forms. Some reports, like Seattle’s, contain separate maps that depict only racial and ethnic concentrations. Reflecting local concerns in Birmingham, Alabama, drafts of the map for that city show not only green, blue, yellow, and red but also gray areas that indicated black concentrations. Separate racial mappings were not made for many other cities, like San Francisco. See HOLC, draft of survey map for Birmingham, Statistical Maps and Graphs, PI 45, entry 9, Urban Statistical Maps, Cartographic Collection, RG31. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 61. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 218.

Notes to Pages 166–180 / 353 113. HOLC, San Francisco Area Descriptions, 3. 114. Sanborn fire insurance map, San Francisco 1913–1950, vol. 2, sheet 193. 115. See, for example, the area bounded by Eighteenth Street, Third Street, TwentySecond Street, and Potrero Avenue on the “Predominant Land Uses” map prepared by the WPA for the City Planning Commission. The area is designated as singlefamily residential, even though it is no-lined on the HOLC map. WPA, Report on San Francisco Citywide Traffic Survey, 1937, 37. The “1939 Real Property Survey” shows that this same area was almost entirely white, with the exception of two blocks in the northeastern part of the area. The no-lined area of the northern Mission varied between blocks that were 100 percent white to those that were between 50 and 89.9 percent nonwhite. Map 7: “Race Occupancy.” 116. HOLC, San Francisco Area Descriptions, D-8. 117. HOLC, Confidential Report for San Francisco, 58-A. See also Area Description for D-1, which noted that one bank lent there “largely as a matter of principle.” 118. American Trust Company was the second-largest lender, with 8,900 loans; San Francisco Bank the third, with 7,417. HOLC, Confidential Report for San Francisco, 58-A, and “Recapitulation, Form 1.” 119. HOLC, San Francisco Area Descriptions, 3. 120. WPA, Traffic Survey, 1937, 241. 121. Kazin, Barons of Labor, 181, 184. 122. Kahn, Imperial San Francisco: Politics and Planning, 83 and 197. 123. In Oakland, the I-880 and the CA-24 have a rough correspondence with no-lined areas, while the I-580 has no correspondence. The I-90 is the only freeway that runs through Spokane; it runs largely through no-lined areas, but also through areas D-9, D-10, C-16, and even partly through area B-8. See HOLC, Spokane Area Descriptions. 124. HOLC, Confidential Report for San Francisco, 62-A. The quote was in reference to area D-12. 125. DCP, “Progress in City Planning: A Report to the People of San Francisco,” 1948, 15. 126. See, for example, FHLBB, “Compilation of Small Home Designs,” 1938, box 1, Home Designs, Cartographic Collections, RG195. 127. For an example of how the FHA promoted neo-traditionalist styles, see the “Model Home Mania” sequence in FHA, “Better Housing News Flashes, No. 7,” newsreel, 1935. CHAPTER EIGHT

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

CB, May 14, 1951. Ibid., April 28, 1951. Ibid., May 14, 1951. Edward and Elizabeth Kelleher to Mayor Elmer Robinson, n.d. [1950], Bayshore Freeway 1943–1958 folder, FC, SFHC. Ibid. See also 1949 correspondence from group of Mission homeowners to San Francisco Planning Commission. W. C. Fraser to City Planning Commissioner, March  16, 1949, and May 13, 1949, Mission Freeway 1949–1958 folder, FC, SFHC. See MMN, March 12, 1942. See, for example, Board of Supervisors, “Journal of Proceedings,” December 17, 1956, and January 26, 1959. “Labor Clarion Suspends Publication,” LC, April 30, 1948.

354 / Notes to Pages 180–187 10. Chron.: March 18, 1952; April 11, 1952; October 21, 1952. 11. “St. Anthony School Dedication Souvenir,” October 7, 1951, St. Anthony’s Parish Historical file, AASF; City of San Francisco, “San Francisco Annual Report for 1955,” 1955, 2–4. 12. City of San Francisco, 1955, 3. 13. Ibid. 14. Chamber of Commerce of the United States, “The Dynamic American City,” informational film, 1956. 15. U.S. Chamber. In a separate sequence describing the need for clearance of aging structures, the narrator states: “It is good that the State of Oregon has placed a statue of the pioneer woodsman on its capitol, a beautiful reminder that the wilderness of this land has been reduced to a dynamic civilization with a simple ax. What amazing achievement there has been in America.” 16. Clarence Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta 1946–1988 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989), 4. 17. San Francisco Housing Association, “Report of the San Francisco Housing Association,” 1911; ibid., “Report of the San Francisco Housing Association,” 1912; Eric Sandweiss, “Building for Downtown Living: The Residential Architecture of San Francisco’s Tenderloin,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 3 (1989): 162; William Issel, “Liberalism and Urban Policy in San Francisco from the 1930s to the 1960s,” The Western Historical Quarterly 22, no. 4 (1991): 441–42. 18. Peter Allen,” A Space for Living: Region and Nature in the Bay Area, 1939–1969” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2009). 19. For more on CIAM, see Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000). 20. See, for example, Le Corbusier, The Radiant City (New York: Orion Press, 1933). 21. MPA, “Constitution and Bylaws,” 1909. 22. Crown Zellerbach Corporation, “The City of Gold: The Story of City Planning in San Francisco,” 1960, 43. Also see Hartman, City for Sale, 10–11; and Mollenkopf, The Contested City, chap. 4, especially 151–54. 23. In this regard San Francisco’s experience seems to mirror Chicago’s, where the progressive housing reform organization, the Metropolitan Housing Council, became the pro-growth Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council. See D. Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Also see Crown Zellerbach, “The City of Gold,” 43; Mollenkopf, Contested City, 168. 24. Crown Zellerbach, “City of Gold,” 19. See also DCP, “Progress in City Planning: A Report to the People of San Francisco,” 1948, 3. 25. See Kahn, Imperial San Francisco: Politics and Planning. 26. Ibid., 192–93. 27. SFPHA, “Now Is the Time to Plan: First Steps to a Master Plan for San Francisco,” pamphlet, 1941, 16. 28. Crown Zellerbach, “The City of Gold,” 33. 29. Ibid.; Jeff Chapman, “Tax Increment Financing and Fiscal Stress: The California Genesis,” in Tax Increment Financing and Economic Development: Uses, Structures, and Impacts, ed. Craig Lawrence Johnson and Joyce Y. Man (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001), 114. 30. DCP, “The Master Plan of the City and County of San Francisco,” 1945, as amended through 1963.

Notes to Pages 187–193 / 355 31. Panels from City and Country of San Francisco, “Mayor’s Committee to Study Freeways: Final Report,” April 22, 1960, 1, Freeway Revolt 1959 folder, FC, SFHC; SFPHA, “Now Is the Time.” 32. Special Assistant to the President for the Planning of Public Works, “Planning for Public Works,” pamphlet, United States Government Printing Office, 1957, 23. 33. Ibid. Each comprehensive planning unit would coordinate with any other that had overlapping jurisdiction. The federal highway plan, for example, would have to be coordinated with states, counties, and municipalities, but not necessarily with a school district. 34. San Francisco City Planning Commission, “New City: San Francisco Redeveloped,” 1947, 6. 35. SFPHA, “Now Is the Time,” 5. 36. Ibid., “Blight and Taxes,” pamphlet, 1947. 37. HOLC, San Francisco Area Descriptions, B-12 and D-1. 38. SFPHA, “Blight and Taxes,” 10. 39. SFPHA, “Now Is the Time,” 3. 40. See Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster, 72–75. 41. City and Country of San Francisco, “Mayor’s Committee to Study Freeways: Final Report,” April 22, 1960, 1. 42. Albert Schlesinger, President Downtown Association, to the City Planning Commission, May 18, 1959, Freeway Revolt 1959 folder, FC, SFHC. 43. Baranski, “Making Public Housing,” 291. 44. San Francisco Housing Association, 1911, 6–7. 45. SHFA, “Annual Report,” 1941, 27–28. 46. Ibid., 1957, 2. 47. Ibid. Because the land acquired by the SFHA was officially federal land, it was not subject to local property taxes; “payments in lieu of taxes” describes equivalent monies paid to the municipality. 48. SFPHA, “Planning as Study Material for Grade School Children: A Report on What Was Done in San Francisco Schools, 1944–1946,” 1946, 3. 49. Ibid., 2. 50. Ibid., 3. 51. Ibid., 6 52. See Elementary School Department, San Francisco Unified School District, San Francisco Today, book 1, San Francisco Social Studies Series, 1948; In and Out of San Francisco, book 2, San Francisco Social Studies Series, 1948; Fun in San Francisco, book 3, San Francisco Social Studies Series, 1949; and At Home in San Francisco, book 4, San Francisco Social Studies Series, 1949, Schools, Social Studies file, VF, SFHC. 53. Elementary School Department, At Home, 27–32. Indeed, the texts celebrated San Francisco’s urban planners: “Do you know that we have experts who improve the neighborhoods and communities? The Mayor chooses five citizens to serve on the Planning Commission. They have many helpers in their offices at the Civic Center. These helpers are members of the Department of City Planning. That is one of the newest departments of our city government. It would be interesting to visit the city planners at their work in the Civic Center. They make maps and plans to show how the city looks today and how it could be improved. Their plan for changes in the city is called the Master Plan.” See Elementary School Department, At Home, 19. 54. Elementary School Department, San Francisco Today , 30.

356 / Notes to Pages 193–198 55. Sy Adler, “The Political Economy of Transit in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945– 1963” (Ph.D. dissertation, UC Berkeley, 1980), 164. 56. Kahn, Imperial San Francisco: Politics and Planning, 198. 57. DCP, “Master Plan.” 58. Paul Harding, “District VII Freeways Report,” California Highways and Public Works: Official Journal of the Division of Highways, Department of Public Works, State of California, January–February 1956, 54. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. For an overview of the federal highway legislation dating back to the Progressive Era, see Owen Gutfreund, Twentieth Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), especially chap. 1. 62. De Leuw Cather and Company Consulting Engineers, with Ladislas Segoe and Associates Consulting City Planners, “Report to the City Planning Commission on a Transportation Plan for San Francisco,” 1948, chap. 2, 1–3 and plates 1–8. 63. There were around 200,000 vehicles registered in San Francisco and 800,000 in all nine of the Bay Area Counties. See Cather and Segoe, Report to the City Planning Commission, plate I-7. 64. The only highway included in the WPA plan which did not appear on the Cather and Segoe report was the Cross-Town Highway in the northern part of the city. 65. See Board of Supervisors, “Journal of Proceedings,” November 10, 1952, and February 16, 1953. 66. Adler, “Political Economy of Transit,” 1980, 39; ibid., “Infrastructure Politics: The Dynamics of Crossing San Francisco Bay,” The Public Historian 10, no. 4 (1988): 27. 67. California Department of Public Works, “Preliminary Studies for an Additional Crossing of San Francisco Bay,” 1947. 68. Joint Army-Navy Board, “An Additional Crossing of San Francisco Bay,” 1947. For an exhaustively researched and persuasively argued account of the Southern Crossing debates, see Adler, “Political Economy of Transit” and “Infrastructure Politics.” 69. See Frank Lloyd Wright and Edgar Kaufmann, Taliesin Drawings: Recent Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1952), 49–50. 70. See Board of Supervisors, “Journal of Proceedings,” June 18, 1941. 71. The Merchants were not vocal on the subject of the Southern Crossing, but when their opinion was solicited, they did add their name to a list of entities that supported the idea. See Fred Cox to Mayor Elmer Robinson, March 12, 1949, box 2, folder 1, ER, SFHC. See also Board of Supervisors, “Journal of Proceedings,” June 18, 1941. The leadership of the Catholic parish church of St. Anthony’s, which was located on Army Street, was ambivalent about the prospect of the widening of Army and constructing a Southern Crossing. The church might be affected by construction and the district might become more commercial than residential. See 1948 Parish of St. Anthony’ Historical Report, St. Anthony’s Parish folder, vol. 1, AASF. 72. Adler, “Infrastructure Politics,” 23–25. 73. Adler, “Infrastructure Politics.” 74. Board of Supervisors, “Journal of Proceedings,” March 21, 1949; Adler, “Infrastructure Politics,” 24. 75. Adler, “Infrastructure Politics.” 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., 29.

Notes to Pages 198–202 / 357 78. Ibid. 79. Chron., March 13, 1949; Exam., March 12, 1949. See also Elmer Robinson, “Press Release,” March 11, 1949; DCP to Elmer Robinson, December 1, 1948, “Memorandum: Southern Bay Crossing,” box 2, folder 1, ER, SFHC. 80. Quoted in Adler, “Infrastructure Politics,” 30. 81. The Southern Crossing was revived several more times over the following decades, but it was never brought to fruition for reasons ranging from financing problems to secret Navy projects. The Southern Crossing plan would be buried once and for all two decades later when the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system installed a tube connecting downtown Oakland to downtown San Francisco—a plan that historian Sy Adler demonstrates was pushed by downtown investment banking interests in part with the hope of foreclosing the possibility of a Southern Crossing. “Infrastructure Politics,” 37–38. 82. See Fred Cox to Elmer Robinson, Winthrop, Branschied, W. F. Wood, Joseph Bellini, and Arthur Phillips, January, 8, 1948, box 2, folder 1, ER, SFHC. Also see Adler, “Political Economy of Transit” and “Infrastructure Politics.” 83. Paul Opperman to City Planning Commission, May 26, 1949, Mission Freeway 1949–1958 folder, FC, SFHC. 84. M. Johnson to Paul Opperman, May 28, 1949, Mission Freeway 1949–1958 folder, FC, SFHC. 85. Mohl, “Stop the Road,” 678–79; Issel, “Land Values,” 625–27. See also Rodriguez, City against Suburb, 32–33. 86. American Institute of Architects (AIA), “Statement Made at City Planning Commission Public Hearing on Trafficways Report—April 13, 1961, On Behalf of the Board of Directors of the Northern California Chapter of the American Institute of Architects,” Freeway Revolt 1959 folder, FC, SFHC. See also Rodriguez, City against Suburb, 36. 87. AIA. The noted landscape architect Thomas Church expressed similar sentiments in a letter to the City Planning Commission. Thomas Church to City Planning Commission, April 10, 1961, Freeway Revolt 1959 folder, FC, SFHC. 88. Schlesinger; City and Country of San Francisco, “Mayor’s Committee to Study Freeways: Final Report,” April 22, 1960, 1; SPUR, “Report to the Honorable George Christopher and Board of Supervisors Regarding the Proposed Freeway and Trafficways Plan for the City and County of San Francisco,” April 1961. See also Rodriguez, City against Suburb, 36. 89. Schlesinger, “Mayor’s Committee.” 90. See Issel, “Land Values”; Mohl, “Stop the Road,” 678. 91. Issel, “Land Values,” 629–32. The Glen Park neighborhood, just to the southwest of the Mission, also produced vocal opposition to freeways. 92. For more on the freeway revolt in San Francisco, see Rodriguez, City against Suburb; and Issel, “Land Values.” For an analysis of both San Francisco and the broader national freeway revolt, see Mohl, “Stop the Road.” 93. City and Country of San Francisco, “Mayor’s Committee to Study Freeways: Final Report,” April 22, 1960. 94. Mohl, “Stop the Road.” 95. Ibid., 679. 96. Issel, “Land Values,” 634. 97. “Land Use Plan,” 1953, 3, in DCP, “Master Plan.”

358 / Notes to Pages 202–205 98. See Land Use Plan, plate 1. The Land Use Plan did not name the “communities” that resulted from its mapping. However, the Urban Renewal Plan, which was adopted in 1960 and used the same boundaries, did name the resulting communities. To the west of the boundary on Mission Street lay a community that the plan referred to as “Mission,” which extended from Market Street to the north, Glen Park to the south, and Twin Peaks to the west. To the east of the boundary lay another community referred to as “Potrero-Bernal,” which contained all of Potrero Hill and Bernal Heights, and the flatlands of the Mission District. The no-lined northeastern section of the neighborhood was referred to as “Division.” These groupings would have been unrecognizable to San Francisco residents. See “The City-Wide Urban Renewal Plan,” 1960, 4–6, in DCP, “Master Plan.” 99. Curiously, the mapping did not draw community boundaries at the Bayshore Freeway and the Central Freeway, which did eventually change the way residents defined the borders of the Mission District—the Bayshore contracting the boundaries inward from the east, and the Central contracting the boundaries inward from the north. 100. Mission Merchants’ Association to City Planning Commission, February 5, 1958, Mission Freeway folder, FC, SFHC. 101. Paul Opperman to Mission Merchants’ Association, February 10, 1958, Mission Freeway folder, FC, SFHC. 102. DCP and Department of Public Works, “Trafficways in San Francisco: A Reappraisal,” 1960, 48. 103. Board of Supervisors, “Journal of Proceedings,” April 7, 1941; December 21, 1942; December 20, 1943; January 18, 1943; August 7, 1944; October 22, 1945; October 24, 1949; December 8, 1952; October 22, 1956. See also “City Hall Rejects Twin Span,” Chron., March 9, 1949. Convenient parking was also frequently referred to in terms of the public interest; see, for example, Board of Supervisors, “Journal of Proceedings,” February 16, 1953. 104. See Board of Supervisors, “Journal of Proceedings,” January 26, 1959. 105. Mohl, “Stop the Road,” 678–79; Issel, “Land Values,” 633. 106. See, for example, Chron., July 15, 1900; Call: December 6, 1905; July 15, 1906. 107. See Call: December 5, 1907; December 6, 1907; Los Angeles Herald, December 5, 1907. 108. Both the aftermath of the disaster of 1906 and the lead-up to the Panama Pacific Exposition of 1915 inspired a variety of different subway proposals, but the idea seemed to surface every few years even without a major event. See Chron.: July 15, 1900; November 22, 1921; February 7, 1918; Call: July 14, 1906; July 15, 1906, December 6, 1907; July 23, 1910; June 29, 1911; January 25, 1913; M. M. O’Shaughnessy, “Subway Report,” San Francisco Department of Public Works, 1930; San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, “Subways, Rapid Transit Trains, Bus Feeders: Only Economical, Practical Solution of Traffic Problem in San Francisco,” 1937. For a summary of plans, see DCP, “A Subway and Rapid Transit System for San Francisco,” April 1950, box 2, folder 33, ER, SFHC. 109. Call, December 6, 1905. 110. Burnham, quoted in DCP, “Rapid Transit System.” 111. Adler, “Infrastructure Politics,” 26. 112. Adler, “Political Economy of Transit,” 86. 113. Dyble, Paying the Toll, 126.

Notes to Pages 206–213 / 359 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121.

122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128.

129. 130. 131.

132. 133. 134. 135. 136.

Adler, “Political Economy,” 89. DCP, “Rapid Transit System”; Adler, “Political Economy,” 287. Adler, “Political Economy.” See BARTD, “General Map, June 6, 1960, Routes,” 1960. BARTD, “General Map, May 2, 1960, Routes,” 1960; Adler, “Political Economy,” 287. Adler, “Political Economy,” 299. Ibid., 302. As Louise Nelson Dyble shows, the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District had always quietly campaigned to keep rapid transit off the Golden Gate, even as it publicly expressed support for the project. Whether or not the bridge district would have succeeded in taking Marin out of BARTD is impossible to know, but San Mateo’s defection made the question moot. See Dyble, Paying the Toll, chap. 5; and Adler, “Political Economy,” 300. Parsons, Brinckerhoff, Hall, and MacDonald, “Regional Rapid Transit: A Report to the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit Commission, 1953–1955,” 1956, 60–61. See Technical Committee of Mayor’s Transportation Council, “Proposed Rapid Transit Routes,” February 1960, plate 1. Adler, “Political Economy,” 308–10. “Robinson Tells of Plan for City Transportation Relief,” ME, October 17, 1947. Adler, “Political Economy,” 308–16. Ibid., 86. As Joel Rast put it, “No single, overarching vision informed planning for the central area [of Chicago]. Instead, planning consisted largely of the uncoordinated efforts of neighborhood planning organizations with few ties to one another and whose principal objective was the revitalization of the areas they served.” “Creating a Unified Business Elite,” 593. Ibid., 586. Ibid., 598. In Chicago, the “downtown-oriented, corporate-center strategy of the 1958 Development Plan succeeded at the expense of neighborhood-level experiments in community development prioritizing different objectives.” Ibid. See Mollenkopf, Contested City; Hartman, City for Sale; Stone, Regime Politics. Rodriguez, City against Suburb, chap. 1. Mohl, “Stop the Road.” See also Issel, “Land Values.” Mohl, “Stop the Road.” See, for example, Rodriguez, City Against Suburb. CHAPTER NINE

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Land Use Plan, 1. DCP, “Housing and Neighborhood Conditions in San Francisco: A Classification of Areas for Urban Renewal,” 1955, 5–6. Ibid., 4. Crown Zellerbach, “City of Gold,” 33. See, for example, HOLC, San Francisco Area Descriptions, D-1. Crown Zellerbach, “City of Gold,” 33. SFPHA, “Blight and Taxes,” 3. DCP, “Housing and Neighborhood Conditions,” 7–10 and plates 1–15. Ibid.

360 / Notes to Pages 215–218 10. In 1950 the Spanish-surname population of the Mission was at about 11 percent of a total population of 47,681; by 1960 it was 23 percent of 51,198 people; and by 1970 the figure was 45 percent of a total population of 51,979. Large areas of the neighborhood were more than 50 percent Latino. Godfrey, Neighborhoods in Transition, 154. 11. Banks v. San Francisco Housing Authority (1953) 120 Cal. App. 2d 1, certiorari denied (1954) 347 U.S. 974. 12. Baranski, “Making Public Housing,” 235–37. See also Stephen Grant Meyer, As Long As They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 143; Albert Broussard, Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900–1954 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 226. 13. Baranski, “Making Public Housing,” 237. 14. For more on SFHA resistance to integration, see Amy Howard, “Peace and Prosperity Dwell among Virtuous Neighbors: America’s Chinatown Housing Project,” paper delivered to Society for American City and Regional Planning History, Oakland, 2009. 15. Polk’s San Francisco City Directory, 1953–1967. 16. Godfrey, Neighborhoods in Transition, 152. 17. Baranski, “Making Public Housing,” 291. 18. Ibid. The Centro Social Obrero was located at Nineteenth and Florida Streets. 19. Board of Supervisors, “Journal of Proceedings,” September 5, 1961. 20. Chron., May 1, 1962. 21. James Casey, interview by Jeffrey Burns, March 20, 1989, transcript, St. Peter’s Parish file, AASF, 4. 22. “St. Anthony’s German Traditions Linger,” The Monitor, November 4, 1960. 23. The following discussion of the ethnic transition of St. Peter’s relies heavily on a remarkable set of oral histories created by Jeffrey Burns, the archivist of the Archdiocese of San Francisco. In 1989, Burns interviewed clergy and employees who witnessed, and participated in, the changes that took place at St. Peter’s from the 1940s to the 1960s. 24. Nicholas Farana, interview by Jeffrey Burns, July 7, 1989, transcript, St. Peter’s Parish file, AASF, 1. 25. Ibid. 26. Farana interview, 2. The little parishes were eventually set up in the 1960s, with the help of the Mission Coalition Organization, about which more in the following chapter. 27. Jeffrey Burns, “¿Que Es Esto? The Transformation of St. Peter’s Parish, San Francisco, 1913–1990,” American Congregations, vol. 1, ed. in James Wind and James Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 416. 28. Casey interview, 4, AASF. 29. Ibid. 30. Isaura Michel de Rodriguez, interview by Jeffrey Burns, July 17, 1989, transcript, St.  Peter’s Parish file, AASF, 1. See also Deacon John Bourne, interview by Jeffrey Burns, April 6, 1989, transcript, St. Peter’s Parish file, AASF, 20–33. 31. In this oral history, conducted some thirty years after the fact by Jeffrey Burns, Rodriguez scrambles some of her chronology. She places the first Spanish-language mass in 1963, though it was in fact conducted in 1964. However, Burns (who has also written on the history of St. Peter’s) confirms that Rodriguez was indeed agi-

Notes to Pages 218–225 / 361

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

tating for Spanish-language services and masses prior to Vatican II. Personal email with Jeffery Burns, October 20, 2014. Also see Burns, Que Es Esto, 1994. Burns, Que Es Esto, 419. Ibid. Casey interview, 5, AASF. Ibid., 5–6. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 9, AASF; Monsignor James Flynn, interview by Jeffrey Burns, January 30, 1989, transcript, St. Peter’s Parish file, AASF, 6–7. James Hagan, interview by Jeffrey Burns, June 19, 1989, transcript, St. Peter’s Parish file, AASF, 3. “SF’s Mission: A Place of Many Voices,” Chron., May 1, 1962. Kazin, Barons of Labor, 164. Ibid. Hagan interview, 3, AASF. Gerald Gamm has highlighted the “special ability of the Catholic parish to sustain neighborhood attachments.” Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 23. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 170. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 16. MNC, “A Self-Portrait of the Greater Mission District,” 1960, 4, in box 4, folder 20, GC, SFHC. Also available in St. Peter’s Parish file, AASF. Ibid., 3. MNC, untitled pamphlet, n.d., in box 4, folder 20, GC, SFHC. See also National Federation of Settlements and Neighborhood Centers, “Building Better Neighborhoods,” pamphlet, in box 3, folder 32, JS, SFHC. MNC, “Self-Portrait,” 3. Ibid., 4. Ibid., foreword. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 10. Ibid., vol. 2, 6. Summers Sandoval, Latinos at the Golden Gate, 123. MNC, “Self-Portrait,” 16. MNC, untitled pamphlet. MNC, “Self-Portrait,” 2. Ellipsis original. Chron., May 3, 1962. Ibid., May 5, 1962. MNC, “Self-Portrait,” 2. Ibid., 1. The population figure reflects all of southeastern San Francisco. Ibid., 1, 16. MNC, n.d., pamphlet; MNC, “Self-Portrait,” vol. 2, 4. MNC, n.d., pamphlet. City Beautiful Campaign to Rolph, May 18, 1912, box 71, folder 1, JR, CHS; Exam. with Civic League and MPA, “Map of the twelve City Beautiful districts,” [1912]. Ibid.

362 / Notes to Pages 227–238 71. See Self, American Babylon; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier; Hirsch Making the Second Ghetto. 72. As Self put it, “White flight was less a flight than a complex and ideological process of state building within discrete spatial boundaries.” American Babylon, 333. CHAPTER TEN

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Godfrey, Neighborhoods in Transition, 154. David Braaten, “SF’s Mission: A Place of Many Voices,” Chron., May 1, 1962. Ibid. Mollenkopf, Contested City, 169. See Orlando Bagwell and W. Noland Walker, Citizen King, documentary film (Boston: WGBH, 2004). See the MNC’s use of the phrase “city within a city” in Mission District Renewal Commission, “The Mission Renews,” n.d., box 3, folder 32, JS, SFHC. Prominent among these interests was the Crocker Bank; Blyth, Eastman Dillon & Co., an investment banking firm; and the Zellerbach Paper Company. Hartman, City for Sale, 3. Also see Castells, “Urban Poverty.” City Demonstration Agency and MMNC, “First Action Year: Comprehensive Development Plan,” 1971, B-36, box 13, Model Cities Reports, RG207; Hartman, City for Sale, 3. Ibid. City Demonstration Agency and MMNC, B-38, RG207; Hartman, City for Sale, 3. San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and Mayor’s Office of Economic Development, “Neighborhood Profile: The Mission District of San Francisco,” 1975, 9. Ibid., 16. Ibid. “Corridor Study,” quoted in City Demonstration Agency and MMNC, B-17, RG207. City Demonstration Agency and MMNC, B-38, RG207. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., B-38 and B-40. Ibid., B-40. Ibid. Ibid. MHDC, “A Plan for the Inner Mission,” book 2, 1974, 3; Godfrey, Neighborhoods in Transition, 150, 154. MHDC, book 2, 3. Godfrey, Neighborhoods, 154. City Demonstration Agency and MMNC, B-32 and C-4, RG207. Godfrey, Neighborhoods, 150–51. City Demonstration Agency and MMNC, B-12, RG207. Burns, Que Es Esto, 418. Ibid., 432. MHDC, book 2, 35. City Demonstration Agency and MMNC, G-11, RG207; see also MNC, untitled pamphlet. Exam., March 16, 1964. SPUR, Report on Trafficways Plan, 1961, 90. See Thea Chroman, “Fruitvale: Deep Oakland,” radio report, KALW 91.7, 2005 (available at http://www.deepoakland.org/sound?id=111).

Notes to Pages 238–244 / 363 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60.

61. 62.

63. 64.

65. 66.

See Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven, 193; Light, “FHA Underwriting,” 651. SFRA, Regular Meeting Minutes, July 8, 1966, 18. Miller, “Organizer’s Tale,” 6; Castells, “Urban Poverty,” 165. MHDC, book 2, 35. Ibid., 19. “Mission: How It Will Be in 1980,” Exam., December 5, 1960, in box 4, folder 20, GC, SFHC. Paco Steele, “Facts on Glue Sniffing,” NM/NM 2, no. 5 (1968): 1. Mike Miller, “The Mission Coalition Organization and the Model Cities Program,” unpublished pamphlet, 1981, 3–4. See also Miller, “Organizer’s Tale,” 1974, 118. City Demonstration Agency and MMNC, B-31, RG207. DCP and SFRA, “A Survey and Planning Application for Mission Street Survey Area (A Summary),” 1966, 3. 42 U.S.C. 1441 Freund, Colored Property, 186. Frederick Wirt, Power in the City: Decision Making in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 248. SFPHA, “Blight and Taxes.” DCP, “Housing and Neighborhood Conditions,” 4. Richard Brandi, “San Francisco’s Diamond Heights: Urban Renewal and the Modernist City,” Journal of Planning History 12 (2013): 133, 134–6. Hartman, City for Sale, 8. See Rick Butler, The Fillmore, documentary film (San Francisco: KQED, 2001); Mollenkopf, Contested City, 169; and Hartman, City for Sale, 76–77. It was because of the Western Addition project and “projects like it around the country that redevelopment and urban renewal became known as ‘Negro removal.’” See Hartman, City for Sale, 63–64. DCP, “Issues in Housing, Housing Report II,” 1969, 26. See also Hartman, City for Sale, 63. Butler, The Fillmore. Jerry Mandel and Carl Werthman, “A Critique of the Redevelopment and Relocation Plans Proposed by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency for Western Addition Area II,” pamphlet, 1964, 6–8. Hartman, City for Sale, 71. Hannibal Williams interview in Butler, The Fillmore. See also Wirt, Power in the City, 258; and Hartman, City for Sale, 18. For a theoretical discussion of the notion of “maximum feasible participation,” see Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 175–80. Quoted in Hartman, City for Sale, 65. For a contemporary legal perspective on the need for more citizen participation, see Alan Harris, “Urban Renewal in the Bay Area: The Need to Stress Human Considerations,” California Law Review 55, no. 3 (1967): 813–35. Mollenkopf, Contested City, 175. San Francisco City Planning Commission, “The Master Plan of San Francisco: The Redevelopment of Blighted Areas: Report on Conditions Indicative of Blight and Redevelopment Policies,” 1945, 19. Ibid. DCP, “Housing and Neighborhood Conditions,” 2.

364 / Notes to Pages 244–247 67. Ibid., 9. 68. Ibid., 7–8. 69. SFRA, “Rapid Transit Corridor Study: Summary and Background of the Study to be Undertaken by the Redevelopment Agency and the Department of City Planning,” 1963, 1; SFRA, “Annual Report,” 1963, 19. 70. SFRA, Minutes, February 8, 1966, 5. 71. SFRA, “Rapid Transit Corridor Study,” November 14, 1966, 1, box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC. 72. See SFRA Annual Reports from 1963 through 1967; and SFRA and DCP, Corridor Study News, October 1965 and May 1966. 73. David Braaten, “Slow Decay—and the Problem of Indifference,” Chron., May 5, 1962. 74. “Vast Plan for Overhauling San Francisco,” Chron., November 4, 1965. 75. Hartman, City for Sale, 13. 76. See, for example, Council for Civic Unity to Christopher, February 20, 1961, box 1, folder 17, GC, SFHC. Handwritten on the correspondence is a note indicating that Christopher accepted an invitation to a luncheon meeting where “Dr. Davis McEntire, of the University of California, will speak on the conditions necessary to maintain stable racially mixed neighborhoods.” His lecture was titled “Evicting Jim Crow.” 77. See, for example, Workmen’s Educational Association of San Francisco to Mayor Christopher, March 21, 1961; Grand Lodge of California to Mayor Christopher, June  6, 1961, box 1, folder 18; Pacific Coast Norwegian Singers Association, August  9, 1961; Clement Street Merchants Association to Christopher, October 15, 1961, box 1, folder 19, GC, SFHC. 78. Paul Opperman to Richard Ives, Regional Director, Urban Renewal Administration, Housing and Home Finance Agency, September 28, 1956, box 85, Unsuccessful Requests for Urban Renewal Demonstration Grants, RG207. 79. The city also proposed a study oriented toward defining the line between a structure that required clearance and one that only required rehabilitation. That funding request was also denied. See Opperman to Ives, September 28, 1956, RG207. 80. David Walker, “New Pattern for Urban Renewal,” Law & Contemporary Problems 25 (1960): 634. 81. Irwin Mussen to Christopher, April 29, 1963, box 4, folder 1, GC, SFHC. 82. See Citizens’ Advisory Committee on the Community Renewal Program, List of Members, n.d. [1963]; William Proctor, Senior City Planner to Edward Murphy, Assistant Director of Planning, January 8, 1963; Proctor to James McCarthy, March 12, 1963, box 4, folder 1, GC, SFHC. 83. MNC to Irwin Mussen, January 27, 1961, box 4, folder 20, GC, SFHC. 84. MNC to Jacob Shemano, Chairman, SFHA, May 26, 1961; John Beard to MNC, May 29, 1961; Beard to the Commission, May 29, 1961, box 4, folder 20, GC, SFHC. 85. MNC to Mussen, May 29, 1961; see also “Can Rehabilitation Save the Mission?” 23rd Assembly District Club Bulletin, n.d.; Mussen to Greater Mission Citizen’s Council, July 19, 1962, box 4, folder 20, GC, SFHC. 86. Herman to Operating Engineers Local Union 3, June 8, 1962, box 4, folder 20, GC, SFHC. 87. Herman to Supervisor Harold Dobbs, November 20, 1962, box 4, folder 20, GC, SFHC. 88. Chron., January 25, 1963.

Notes to Pages 247–251 / 365 89. 90. 91. 92.

93. 94. 95.

96. 97. 98. 99.

100. 101. 102.

103.

104.

105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110.

Ibid. “A Fresh Approach to the Slum Fight,” Exam., November 24, 1959. Christopher to President Kennedy, February 9, 1961, box 4, folder 3, GC, SFHC. Arthur D. Little, Inc., “San Francisco Community Renewal Program—Purpose, Scope, and Methodology: A Progress Report to the Department of City Planning,” August 1963, 8, box 4, folder 6, GC, SFHC. Quoted in “Meetings Held by the Mission Council,” box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC. “Rapid Transit Corridor Study,” n.d. [196-], box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC. Ibid., November. 14, 1966, 1; SPUR, “Report: Mission District Renewal,” December 1966; Shelley to Board of Supervisors, November 29, 1966; Shelley to Everett Griffin, Chairman SFRA and Ronald Pelosi, President, City Planning Commission, May  5, 1966; box 2, folder 25; T. J. Kent, “Memorandum,” April 8, 1966, box 2, folder 10; Clippings from San Francisco Progress, Exam., and Chron., box 2, folder 26; JS, SFHC; MMNC with the City Demonstration Agency, C-4. Exam., December 5, 1960; “Rapid Transit Corridor Study,” n.d. [196-], box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC. MMNC with the City Demonstration Agency, B-17. Civic Committee for the Mission District Redevelopment to Board of Supervisors, August 23, 1962, box 4, folder 20, GC, SFHC. Civic Committee for the Mission District Redevelopment to Board of Supervisors; Greater Mission Citizens’ Council to Board of Supervisors, November 14, 1962, box 4, folder 20, GC, SFHC. Mission District Renewal Commission, “The Mission Renews,” n.d., box 3, folder 32, JS, SFHC. Mussen to Christopher, August 24, 1962, box 4, folder 20, GC, SFHC. The agencies represented were DCP, SPUR, and the MNC. See handwritten notes of meeting, September 17, 1962; and “Can Rehab Save the Mission?” n.d., box 4, folder 20, GC, SFHC. See, for example, statements made by Supervisor Jack Morrison in discussion of a plan for the Mission: “We believe that a Mission District Renewal Plan, acceptable to the city, must be one that emphasizes restoration of present buildings in a way that allows Mission District residents to remain there. We do not believe in teardown redevelopment of the Mission District.” Untitled notes of “Public Buildings, Land and City Planning Committee of the Board of Supervisors,” January 17, 1963, box 4, folder 20, GC, SFHC. “Requesting Redevelopment Agency to Initiate Action for a Study and Survey of Mission District Area,” Resolution No. 78–63, February 12, 1963, box 4, folder 20, GC, SFHC. See also “The Mission Renews,” Mission District Renewal Commission, n.d., box 3, folder 32, JS, SFHC. Wiley, National Trust Guide, 88. See HRC, “Second Annual Report,” 1967, and “Everybody Wants to Live in San Francisco,” n.d., flier, VF, SFHC. HRC, “Second Annual Report,” 1967, 17, 21, VF, SFHC. The Urban Renewal Committee was later renamed the Housing and Urban Development Committee. Edgar Osgood, Chairman of the HRC, to Mayor Shelley, January 26, 1967, VF, SFHC. “A Preliminary Report on the Activities of the Economic Opportunity Council of San Francisco, Inc.,” April 28, 1966, 2, box 4, folder 39, JS, SFHC. Preliminary Report of the EOC, April 28, 1966. See also EOC to Shelley, April 5,

366 / Notes to Pages 251–254

111. 112. 113. 114. 115.

116. 117.

118. 119.

120.

121. 122.

123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

128.

129. 130.

1965; Shelley to EOC, April 13, 1965; “Excerpt from ‘Summary of the Proposed Community Action Program of the EOC,” box 1, folder 5, JM, SFHC. EOC Bylaws, box 4, folder 39, JS, SFHC. Preliminary Report of the EOC, April 28, 1966, 11. EOC Bylaws, JS, SFHC. Stone, Regime Politics, 4. Urban Renewal Administration, Housing and Home Finance Agency, “News . . . for Release,” Project Number: Calif. R-84 (GN), October 15, 1964, box 85, Unsuccessful Requests for Urban Renewal Demonstration Grants, RG207. HRC, “Second Annual Report,” 1967, 20, VF, SFHC. Draft, “Rapid Transit Corridor Study,” box 2, folder 11, JS, SFHC. See also SFRA flier advertising public meetings: SFRA, “The Mission Is a Good Neighborhood. Let’s Keep It That Way!” flier, December 1966, box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC. Mayor Shelley had insisted that special efforts be made to reach Spanish-speaking residents, who should not be displaced from the neighborhood. See Shelley to Griffin and Pelosi, May 5, 1966, JS, SFHC. “Abstract of Proposed Board of Supervisors Resolution No. 148–66–3.1, Survey and Planning for Rehabilitation-Renewal of Inner Mission,” box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC. Quotation comes from a document in Kent’s files, within the larger Shelley Mayoral collection; the document lists no author, but the voice is consistent with other statements made by Kent and is presumed to be authored by him. “Rapid Transit Corridor,” n.d., box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC. “Rapid Transit Corridor Study,” November 14, 1966, 1, box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC; “Abstract of Proposed Board of Supervisors Resolution No. 148–66–3.1, Survey and Planning for Rehabilitation-Renewal of Inner Mission,” box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC. “Rapid Transit Corridor Study,” November 14, 1966, 1, box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC. HUD, “Questions and Answers to Explain the Demonstration Cities Act of 1966,” January 12, 1966, box 2, folder 8, JS, SFHC. See also Self, American Babylon, 243; John Lindquist and Charles Barresi, “Ghetto Residents and Urban Politics: Attitudes toward Urban Renewal,” Law & Society Review 5, no. 2 (1970): 241. HUD, Demonstration Cities Act Q&A, 1966, JS, SFHC. Robert Weaver, “A Partnership for Urban Progress,” text of address delivered to Annual Conference of Mayors, Dallas, June 13, 1966, 4–5, box 2, folder 11, JS, SFHC. Shelley to Board of Supervisors, February 11, 1966, box 2, folder 8, JS, SFHC. Labor was represented by the SFLC and BTC, downtown by SPUR and the Chamber of Commerce, and the social planning regime by the HRC and EOC. “Departments and Organizations Represented at Meetings to Discuss the Preparation of a Preliminary Application for a City Demonstration Grant,” March 30, 1966, box 2, folder 9, JS, SFHC. Nathan Cooper, “Memorandum to Mayor’s Advisory Committee on City Demonstration Program,” May 25, 1966, 2, box 2, folder 10, JS, SFHC. The final legislation from November 1966 would require that cities establish a nonprofit under the mayor before funds would be dispersed, so the SFRA’s and the EOC’s bids to administer the program would not have been approved in any case. Draft of “The Selection of an Area or Areas Suitable for the Proposed City Demonstration Program,” April 11, 1966, 5, box 2, folder 10, JS, SFHC. The cooperation Kent referred to was both among city agencies (particularly the SFRA and DCP) and between city agencies and the community. See J. R. McCarthy, Director of City Planning, to Kent, March 25, 1966, box 2, folder 9; Kent, “Mem-

Notes to Pages 254–258 / 367

131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136.

137.

138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144.

145.

146. 147.

orandum,” May 6, 1966, box 2, folder 10; draft, “Rapid Transit Corridor Study,” June 9, 1966, box 2, folder 11, JS, SFHC. Shelley to Board of Supervisors, September 14, 1966, 2, box 2, folder 14, JS, SFHC. Kent to Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Proposed City Demonstration Program, March 9, 1967, box 2, folder 16, JS, SFHC. M. F. Groat to Kent, May 26, 1966, box 2, folder 11, JS, SFHC. Ibid. Kent to HUD, October 28, 1966, box 2, folder 15, JS, SFHC. S. M. Tartarian, Director of Public Works, to Thomas Mellon, Chief Administrative Officer, Public Works, March 21, 1967; James Lang, General Manager, Recreation and Park Department, to Kent, March 21, 1967; James Carr, General Manager, Public Utilities Commission, to Kent, March 21, 1967; Herman to Kent, March 22, 1967, box 2, folder 16, JS, SFHC. McCarthy, Director of City Planning, to Kent, March 25, 1966. Also see “New Position: Mayor’s Deputy for Social Programs,” March 1966; Peter Trimble (for Shelley) to Peggy Best, October 18, 1966, box 2, folder 19, JS, SFHC. Kent to Mayor’s Committee on City Demonstration Program, March 9, 1967. Helen Fama to Kent, December 8, 1966, box 2, folder 16, JS, SFHC. John Anderson to Kent, September 1, 1966, box 2, folder 14, JS, SFHC. See also Mike Miller, A Community Organizer’s Tale: People and Power in San Francisco (Berkeley: Heyday, 2009), 24. Emphasis original. Shelley to Board of Supervisors, September 14, 1966. See, for example, HRC to Nathan Cooper, Controller, April 26, 1966, box 2, folder 10, JS, SFHC. This view was expressed not only in planning circles and on the editorial pages of the major dailies but increasingly also in smaller, merchant-run papers like The San Francisco Shopping News. See “Redevelopment Too Often Overlooks Human Element,” The San Francisco Shopping News, February 9, 1967 in box 2, folder 26, JS, SFHC. SPUR acknowledged that citizen involvement had been insufficient in early SFRA projects. See SPUR, “Report: Mission District Renewal,” December 1966, box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC. Cyril Herrmann, of Arthur D. Little, Inc., “San Francisco at the Crossroads,” San Francisco Business Magazine, July–August 1966, box 2, folder 22, JS, SFHC. Kent also noted that there was some question about whether the proposed nonprofit corporation could be given all the authority needed under the city charter. See Kent to Shelley, March 22, 1967, box 2, folder 16, JS, SFHC. CHAPTER ELEVEN

1. 2. 3.

4.

Miller, Community Organizer’s Tale, 1. MCOR, “Critique of Redevelopment Agency’s Application for a Survey and Planning Grant,” n.d., 13, box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC. Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage: 1975), 571; Roberta Brandes Gratz, “Authentic Urbanism and the Jane Jacobs Legacy,” in Urban Villages and the Making of Communities, ed. Peter Neal (London: Spon Press, 2005), 25. Ellipsis indicates original pause. Ric Burns, New York, episode 7: “The City and the World,” documentary, PBS, 1999. See also Anthony Flint, Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City (New York: Random House, 2009).

368 / Notes to Pages 259–269 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

See especially Castells, “Urban Poverty”; and Summers Sandoval, Latinos at the Golden Gate. Mission District Renewal Commission, “The Mission Renews,” n.d., box 3, folder 32, JS, SFHC. See also Miller, “Organizer’s Tale,” 1974, 16. Okamoto/Liskamm, “Mission District Urban Design Study: Prepared for the San Francisco City Planning Commission,” 1966. DCP and SFRA, “Planning Application,” 4. Ibid., 3 Justin Herman to Joseph Alioto, November 22, 1967, JA, SFHC. Compare Herman to Alioto with Okamoto/Liskamm; and SFDCP and SFRA, “Planning Application.” SFRA, “General Neighborhood Renewal Plan—Rapid Transit Corridor,” 1962– 1963, 15. See part 3 of City within a City; and Mission Merchants’ Association to City Planning Commission, February 5, 1958, in Mission Freeway file, FC, SFHC. For example, Castells writes that in the Western Addition “3,119 housing units were demolished; it seems that community mobilization prevented the Mission from undergoing the physical destruction that other minority residential areas in the city suffered.” See “Urban Poverty,” 144, 159. Also see Hartman, City for Sale, 330. For more on Chavez Ravine, see Avila, Popular Culture. J. J. Rodriguez, LA CSO to L.A. City Councilman Karl L. Rundberg, September 25, 1957, box 6, Edward Ross Roybal Papers (collection number 847), Department of Special Collections, CY, UCLA. Miller, Community Organizer’s Tale, 25, 34, 47; ibid., “Organizer’s Tale,” 12. Gallegos would go on to found the National Council of La Raza. See Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Random House, 1971). Castells, “Urban Poverty,” 164. Miller, “Organizer’s Tale,” 18. Ibid., 16. See Miller, “Organizer’s Tale,” 16; MCOR, “Critique of Redevelopment Agency’s Application for a Survey and Planning Grant,” n.d., 13, box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC. SFRA, “Rapid Transit Corridor Study,” November 25, 1966, 1, box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC. Ibid. Exam., June 13, 1966. Miller described the Progressive Labor Party as standing at the far “left of the political spectrum” in the Mission; because of its perceived “extremism,” its “leadership was unacceptable to the majority of the Mission’s leaders and activists.” See Miller “Organizer’s Tale,” 10 and 14. See Miller “Organizer’s Tale,” 10 and 14. MCOR, “Critique of Redevelopment Agency’s Application for a Survey and Planning Grant,” n.d., 13, box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC. DCP and SFRA, “Planning Application,” 4; see also Bruce Ackerman, “Regulating Slum Housing Markets on Behalf of the Poor: Of Housing Codes, Housing Subsidies and Income Redistribution Policy,” The Yale Law Journal 80, no. 6 (1971): 1093–97. Quoted in Hartman, City for Sale, 26. East Mission Improvement Association, newsletter, February 1967, box 2, folder 26, JS, SFHC.

Notes to Pages 269–274 / 369 31. Miller, “The Mission Coalition Organization,” 4; Summers Sandoval, Latinos at the Golden Gate, 131. 32. Handwritten notes of meeting, September 17, 1962, box 4, folder 20, GC, SFHC. 33. SFRA, Minutes, June 28, 1966. 34. Ibid., 7. 35. Ibid., 8. 36. Ibid. 37. DCP and SFRA, “Planning Application,” 5. 38. Shelley to Griffin and Pelosi, May 5, 1966, JS, SFHC. 39. SFRA, Minutes, August 9, 1966, 11. 40. Ibid. 41. “Meetings Held by the Mission Council,” box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC. See also Chron.: “Supervisors Kill Mission District Renewal Project,” December 20, 1966; “Redevelopment Agency Warning: A Creeping Threat to 5000 Mission Dwellings,” October 12, 1966; “The Inner Mission’s Future,” Exam., June 13, 1966. 42. “Meetings Held by the Mission Council,” 8, JS, SFHC. 43. Miller, “Organizer’s Tale,” 136–37. 44. “Meetings Held by the Mission Council,” 10, JS, SFHC. 45. Ibid., 5. 46. This effort apparently failed, but the fact that it was suggested illustrates the depth of the enmity between Herman and neighborhood groups. “Mission Council on Redevelopment Asks for Federal Investigation,” press release, n.d., box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC. 47. “Meetings Held by the Mission Council,” 4, JS, SFHC. 48. SFRA, Minutes, September 27, 1966, 6. 49. Ibid., 7. 50. “Meetings Held by the Mission Council,” 10, JS, SFHC; Herman to Jerry Pence and Herman Gallegos, September 27, 1966, box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC. 51. “Meetings Held by the Mission Council,” 4, JS, SFHC. 52. SFRA, Minutes, September 27, 1966, 8. 53. Pence and Gallegos to Morrison, September 26, 1966, JS, SFHC. 54. MUNI is the name of San Francisco’s light rail system. MCOR to Shelley, telegram, October 5, 1966, box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC. 55. Miller, “Organizer’s Tale,” 21. 56. “Meetings Held by the Mission Council,” 6, JS, SFHC. 57. Cahill Maloney, “Neighborhoods vs. City Hall,” April 19–20, 1967, San Francisco Progress, in box 2, folder 16, JS, SFHC. 58. Ibid. 59. HRC to Supervisor Peter Tamaras, October 10, 1966, box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC. 60. See marked-up MCOR Resolution, n.d., box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC. Also see “Meetings Held by the Mission Council,” 2, 5, JS, SFHC. 61. Herman to Pence and Gallegos, September 27, 1966, JS, SFHC. 62. SPUR to Shelley, January 13, 1967, box 2, folder 26, JS, SFHC. See also Supervisor Joe Beeman to Gallegos, February 27, 1967, box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC. 63. SPUR to Board of Supervisors, March 2, 1967; Citizens Active for a Revitalization Effort Soon, “Mission Cares!!” flier, March 15, 1967, box 2, folder 26, JS, SFHC. 64. SFRA, “Questions and Answers on the Rehabilitation-Renewal Study proposed for the Inner Mission,” March 1967, box 2, folder 26, JS, SFHC. See also SFRA, “Why

370 / Notes to Pages 274–282

65.

66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82.

Can’t Present Residents Stay in the Mission after Rapid Transit? They Can!” March 3, 1967, box 2, folder 26, JS, SFHC. Proposed resolution, “Approving Undertaking of Surveys and Plans for an Urban Renewal Project in an Area to be Known as Mission Street Survey Area,” March 6, 1967, box 2, folder 26, JS, SFHC. See also Proposed resolution, “Establishing Policies of the Board of Supervisors Regarding Inner Mission Rehabilitation-Renewal,” March 6, 1967, box 2, folder 26, JS, SFHC. See MCOR to Shelley, March 13, 1967; SFRA to Shelley, March 15, 1967; Shelley to MCOR, March 15, 1967; box 2, folder 26, JS, SFHC. HRC to John Anderson, September 6, 1966, box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC; “Meetings Held by the Mission Council,” 4; HRC to Supervisor Tamaras, October 10, 1966, JS, SFHC. Joseph Arington, Mayor’s Deputy for Social Programs, to SPUR, March 31, 1967, box 2, folder 16, JS, SFHC; Maloney, “Neighborhoods vs. City Hall,” JS, SFHC. Maloney, “Neighborhoods vs. City Hall,” JS, SFHC. Ibid. Ibid., Shelley to Board of Supervisors, November 29, 1966, box 2, box 25, JS, SFHC. Quoted in Hartman, City for Sale, 65. Maloney “Neighborhoods vs. City Hall,” JS, SFHC. The title of Maloney’s article is inapt, since in fact the mayor and his staff ultimately sided with the neighborhoods (though it is of course difficult to imagine an editor at a daily paper greenlighting “Neighborhoods vs. SPUR”). See also SPUR, “Report: Mission District Renewal,” December 1966, box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC. The editorial page of the Exam. represented MCOR much as SPUR did. See “The Supervisors Knuckle Under,” Exam., December 22, 1966, box 2, folder 25, JS, SFHC. SPUR to Kent, March 28, 1967, box 2, folder 16, JS, SFHC. SPUR to Arington, April 7, 1967, box 2, folder 16, JS, SFHC. Shelley to Board of Supervisors, November 29, 1966; See also Shelley to Griffin and Pelosi, May 5, 1966, JS, SFHC. Kent, “Memorandum,” May 6, 1966; Shelley to Griffin and Pelosi, May 5, 1966, JS, SFHC. Kent was speaking of the smattering of resistance to the 1962 bond issue for BART. Regional Oral History Office, “An Oral History of T. J. Kent Jr.” 1981–1982, 44, box 5, folder 3, TK, Banc. “Report of Committee on Citizens’ Organizations,” n.d., box 2, folder 1, TK, Banc. Greater Mission Citizens’ Council to Walter Steilberg, April 23, 1962; handwritten notes on Spanish Cultural Center, n.d., box 4, folder 20, GC, SFHC. Chron., May 5, 1962 “Meetings Held by the Mission Council,” 9, JS, SFHC. C H A P T E R T W E LV E

1.

2. 3. 4.

Drawing largely on the participant observations of the organizer Mike Miller, Castells and recently Summers Sandoval have already done an excellent job of researching and analyzing the organizing experience of the MCO. However, these scholarly works pay less attention to the perspective of municipal government and almost no attention to the SFRA. Mollenkopf, Contested City, 187. Miller, “Organizer’s Tale,” 28; Castells, “Urban Poverty,” 144. Herman to Alioto, 2. Kent also urged Alioto to move forward with a planning effort

Notes to Pages 282–285 / 371

5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

in the Mission District. See Kent to Shelley, December 28, 1967, 7, box 5, folder 10, JS, SFHC. Herman to Alioto, 2. Around the same time, Herman quietly suggested to a HUD official that if a Model Cities program were devised for the Mission, the SFRA should administer it. See Herman to Thomas Rogers, Director of Urban Technology and Research, HUD, November 10, 1967, box 85, Unsuccessful Requests for Urban Renewal Demonstration Grants, RG207. Miller, “Organizer’s Tale,” 50. See also Castells, “Urban Poverty,” 147. Miller, Community Organizer’s Tale, 128–30. Miller, “Organizer’s Tale,” 11 and 19. For more on Bartalini’s perspective, see “The FACE Program, an Alternative to Redevelopment Agency’s Proposed RehabilitationRenewal Project for the Mission,” flier, n.d., box 2, folder 22; Bartalini to Shelley, August 8, 1966, box 2, folder 25; “The Land-Grabbers Are at it Again,” flier, n.d., box 2, folder 26, JS, SFHC. Also see undated newspaper clipping from The Leader, St. Peter’s Parish file, AASF; Tomás Sandoval, “Mission Stories, Latino Lives: The Making of San Francisco’s Latino Identity, 1945–1970” (Ph.D. dissertation, UC Berkeley, 2002), 147. Miller, “Organizer’s Tale,” 42. Ibid., Community Organizer’s Tale, 280. The interest group vice presidencies were for Business, National, Youth, Seniors, and Block Clubs. The nationality vice presidencies were for Mexicans, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, Mexican-Americans, Central Americans, South Americans, Afro-Americans, Anglo-Americans, and FilipinoAmericans. Women also served as the Salvadoran vice president, South American vice president, Afro-American vice president, national vice president, recording secretary, corresponding secretary, youth committee chair, health committee chair, community maintenance chair, and consumer committee chair. See Miller, Community Organizer’s Tale, 279–81. Miller, “Organizer’s Tale,” 40. Ibid., 50–51. Ibid., 136. See John Strange, “Citizen Participation in Community Action and Model Cities Programs,” Public Administration Review 32, special issue, Curriculum Essays on Citizens, Politics, and Administration in Urban Neighborhoods (1972): 655–69; Miller, Community Organizer’s Tale, 42. MMNC with the City Demonstration Agency, I-4; MHDC, book 2, 73; Miller, Community Organizer’s Tale, 125–26, 130. Castells, “Urban Poverty,” 149; “March for Coalition,” NM/NM 3, no. 5 (1969): 8–9; Miller, “Organizer’s Tale,” 138. MMNC with the City Demonstration Agency, P-2. Castells, “Urban Poverty,” 139. Sherry Arnstein, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35, no. 4, (1969): 223. Arnstein’s famous ladder of citizen participation contained eight rungs began at the lowest level of participation and ascended to the highest: (1) Manipulation, (2) Therapy, (3) Informing, (4) Consultation, (5) Placation, (6) Partnership, (7) Delegated Power, and (8) Citizen Control. For more on community development corporations, see Peterman, Neighborhood Planning. “East Mission Wows ’Em at City Hall,” NM/NM 3, no. 2 (1969): 8–9. DCP and SFRA, “Planning Application,” 4.

372 / Notes to Pages 285–291 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

MMNC with the City Demonstration Agency, I-4, C-1, K-1. Ibid., C-1. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., I-4. Ibid., I-2. Ibid., I-4, I-8. Ibid., C-1. Ibid., C-9, C-16. Ibid., C-1, C-6. Ibid., E-1. Ibid., H-1, I-1. Ibid., B-18. Emphasis original. MMNC with the City Demonstration Agency, C-3; see also C-11, C-16, I-1, K-6. MMNC with the City Demonstration Agency, C-8. Ibid., K-6. The MMNC noted that relations with the OEO and Health, Education, and Welfare were particularly cordial and productive. Ibid., B-8. Ibid., D-1, V-5, V-10, B-25; MHDC, book 2, 35–36, 62. For more on the social programs created with Model Cities funding in the Mission, see Stephen Weissman, “The Limits of Citizen Participation: Lessons from San Francisco’s Model Cities Program,” Western Political Quarterly 31, no. 1 (1978): 32–47. Miller, “Organizer’s Tale,” 137; Miller, Community Organizer’s Tale, 199. MMNC with the City Demonstration Agency, C-1. The third- and fourth ranked problems were “Inadequate street maintenance and Inadequate garbage disposal services.” MMNC with the City Demonstration Agency, B-20. MHDC, book 2, 5; book 1, 15. MMNC with the City Demonstration Agency, B-21. NM/NM, “East Mission Wows ’Em”; “East Mission Action Council (EMAC) Closes 26th to Extend Garfield Park,” NM/NM 3, no. 3 (1969); MHDC, book 2, 57. Castells, “Urban Poverty,” 148. MMNC with the City Demonstration Agency, M-2. See Sanborn fire insurance maps, San Francisco, 1913–1950, vol. 6, 1914, sheets 595, 596, 611, 613, 549, 550; vol. 2, 1914–1950, sheets 204, 205. Sanborn fire insurance maps, San Francisco, 1913–1950, vol. 6, 1914–1950, sheet 618. MMNC with the City Demonstration Agency, C-1, B-12, C-26. Ibid., B-12. Ibid. Ibid., B-13. Ibid. Ibid., B-13, B-31. Ibid., B-23, B-30, C-28. SPUR, Report on Trafficways Plan, 1961, 90. SPUR, 1970, 7. Note the circumspect tone in which the MMNC discussed SPUR in MMNC with the City Demonstration Agency, K-6, C-8.

Notes to Pages 291–297 / 373 62. Ibid., V-2. 63. Ibid., L-10. 64. The Galería also received commissions from the Mission Rebels, Horizon Unlimited, and the Florida Daycare Center, all entities funded through the OEO and/or Model Cities. MMNC with the City Demonstration Agency, L-11. 65. The MMNC approved $12,000 in support for the Galería, but the program was suspended. MMNC with the City Demonstration Agency, L-12, L-13. 66. HOLC, San Francisco Area Descriptions, 4. 67. MCO, “A Housing Plan for the Mission, Draft” n.d., unpaginated, SFHC. 68. MHDC, book 1, 7; MCO, “A Housing Plan for the Mission, Draft,” n.d., unpaginated, SFHC. 69. MHDC, book 1, 7. Emphasis mine. 70. Herman to Alioto, 4. 71. SFRA, “Regal Pale Redevelopment Project: Redevelopment Plan,” 1970, 3; MMNC with the City Demonstration Agency, J-7, B-7; Chron.: “Project at Old Brewery Site: OK on Mission Housing,” March 12, 1970; “Supervisors’ OK: Low-Rent Plan on Brewery Site,” January 5, 1971; “Regal Pale Project Stalled: Housing Hassle in Mission,” San Francisco Progress, February 18, 1972. 72. MMNC with the City Demonstration Agency, J-7. 73. SFRA, “Regal Pale,” 3. 74. Castells, “Urban Poverty,” 151–52. 75. MMNC with the City Demonstration Agency, V-30; Miller, “Organizer’s Tale,” 146. 76. MMNC with the City Demonstration Agency, B-27. 77. Ibid. 78. Castells, “Urban Poverty,” 151, 173. 79. Ibid., 152. 80. Ibid., 173–74. 81. MHDC, book 2, 6. 82. Ibid., 8. 83. MHDC, book 1, 12, and 15. 84. Castells, “Urban Poverty,” 173. 85. Hagan interview, 20, AASF. 86. Ibid. 87. Mrs. Bixley to St. Peter’s Parish Church, n.d. [1969], St. Peter’s Parish file, AASF. 88. Los Siete, documentary film (San Francisco: California Newsreel films), 1969. 89. SPUR, 1970, 7. 90. See chaps. 5 and 6 of Jason Ferreira, “All Power to the People: A Comparative History of Third World Radicalism in San Francisco, 1968–1974” (Ph.D. dissertation, UC Berkeley, 2003). 91. See Marjorie Heins, “Strictly Ghetto Property: The Story of Los Siete de la Raza,” pamphlet (Berkeley: Ramparts Press), 1972, unpaginated. See also Los Siete, film. 92. Los Siete, film. 93. Alvin Rosenfeld, “The Friendly Fuzz,” The Nation, April 21, 1969. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid. 96. A particularly shocking incident occurred in 1968, when off-duty officer Michael O’Brien got into an argument with an African American man named Carl Hawkins over a scratch on his boat. Another black man, Otis Baskett, intervened in the argument and was subsequently shot and killed by O’Brien. In the investigation and

374 / Notes to Pages 297–300

97. 98.

99. 100. 101.

102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

119. 120. 121. 122. 123.

subsequent trial, witnesses reported that O’Brien had been drunk and had repeatedly called Hawkins, Baskett, and a number of bystanders “nigger.” In spite of overwhelming evidence of excessive use of force, O’Brien was acquitted, a decision that the NAACP condemned. See article in San Francisco’s African American newspaper: “Jurors Drink to Verdict,” The Sun Reporter, March 29, 1969; see also Ferreira, “All Power to the People,” 253. Quoted in Rosenfeld. Ferreira, “All Power to the People,” 264; Heins, “Strictly Ghetto Property.” That this statement was made by the daughter of Joseph Brodnik is significant: Brodnik was the officer who was killed in the episode that precipitated the formation of Los Siete. “Review Board,” NM/NM, February, 1968; Ferreira, “All Power to the People,” 255. MMNC with the City Demonstration Agency, B-23. Birney Jarvis, “A Gang’s Terror in the Mission,” Chron., April 25, 1969. Jarvis “had been a charter member and vice president of the San Francisco chapter of the Hells Angels.” See Carl Nolte, “Birney Jarvis, Former Chronicle Reporter, Dies,” Chron., June 8, 2012. Chron., Jarvis: “A Gang’s Terror,” April 25, 1969; “A Defense of Mission Teenagers,” April 26, 1969; “Merchants Deny Story of Terror,” April 30, 1969. Ibid.: “Defense of Mission Teenagers”; “Merchants Deny Story.” Quoted in Ferreira, “All Power to the People,” 260. Ibid. NYT: “Coast Radicals Rally Behind 6 Latin Youths on Trial in Slaying of Policeman,” October 11, 1970; “6 Cleared in Death of Coast Policeman,” November 8, 1970. NYT, November 8, 1970. See Ferreira, “All Power to the People.” Heins, “Strictly Ghetto Property.” EOC to Morrison, May 8, 1968, box 1, folder 5, JM, SFHC. Ferreira, “All Power to the People,” 197–98. Heins, “Strictly Ghetto Property.” Self, American Babylon, 299–302. Ibid. Los Siete, film. Ibid. Heins, “Strictly Ghetto Property.” Ferreira, “All Power to the People,” 277. See also Heins, “Strictly Ghetto Property.” Amador’s description of her parents tracks closely with some of the self-descriptions of the Mexican subjects interviewed in Paul Radin’s survey of ethnicities in San Francisco. See especially David Craig interview of unnamed Mexican subject, November 15, 1934, box 2, folder 18, PR, SFHC. Craig’s subject, and likely Amador’s parents, were among the first generation of Latinos admitted to unions in San Francisco in the 1930s. Ferreira, “All Power to the People,” 277. Ibid. Los Siete, film. Heins, “Strictly Ghetto Property.” The judge in question was Gerald Chargin. See Chron., October 3, 1969. See Heins, “Strictly Ghetto Property”; and Los Siete, film. The events around Los Siete not only garnered national media attention but were also alluded to in popu-

Notes to Pages 301–303 / 375

124. 125. 126.

127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134.

135. 136.

lar television series and in films. For example, an episode of the television show The Streets of San Francisco was clearly inspired by the events that precipitated the formation of Los Siete. (The episode, titled “Hall of Mirrors,” first aired on November 4, 1972.) The two series protagonists, detectives played by Karl Malden and Michael Douglas, are joined in a Mission District case by a blond, blue-eyed detective who holds violently racist attitudes toward Latinos. At the resolution of the episode, however, it is revealed that the racist detective is himself a Latino who was raised in the Mission. Though the episode appears to confront the question of police racism, in fact it dodges the question, attributing violent and discriminatory policing methods to intra-ethnic tensions rather than to institutional racism in the police department. Other popular allusions to Los Siete are less morally ambiguous than in The Streets of San Francisco episode. An allusion in the 1971 film, Dirty Harry, for example, seems to express only anger. In the opening scene of the film, before the credits, the camera pans across a plaque dedicated to the memory of San Francisco police officers who lost their lives in the line of duty. The camera finally focuses on the name of Joseph Brodnik, the officer who was killed in the 1969 incident that precipitated the formation of Los Siete. After pausing on this frame for at least ten seconds, the film begins. The main character in the film, also set in San Francisco, is a vigilante detective, played by Clint Eastwood, who disregards bureaucratic police procedure in order to punish criminals. Heins, “Strictly Ghetto Property.” This according to Mike Miller. “The Mission Coalition Organization,” 1981. See Hagan interview, AASF. During the 1960s, St. Peter’s developed a reputation, in San Francisco and beyond, as a radical church. One measure of this reputation would come in 1974: Hagan recalled that “when Patty Hearst was abducted . . . the Symbionese Liberation Army had a representative call me and said, ‘Would St. Peter’s be a place where they could give out the food that was gained by the ransom payments from the Hearst family?’ On the phone I basically told them to go to hell.” Hagan and St. Peter’s advocated on behalf of unions and Latino social service groups, but never condoned some of the more radical politics that flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The parish church’s support of Los Siete was not an endorsement of the group’s revolutionary discourse; rather, the church was supporting Los Siete’s commitment to the principles of self-determination and mutual assistance, and its commitment to the space of the neighborhood. See Hagan interview, 20, AASF; and Burns, Que Es Esto, 434–35. Heins, “Strictly Ghetto Property.” Miller, Community Organizer’s Tale, 71. Ibid. Ibid., 164–66. Miller, “Organizer’s Tale,” 50–51. Miller, Community Organizer’s Tale, 231, 234. Ibid. Castells’s analysis of the end of the organization draws heavily on the unpublished 1974 memoir (“Organizer’s Tale”) by Mike Miller, the Alinsky-trained organizer who was crucial to the early work of MCOR and the MCO. Miller expanded his account and published it as A Community Organizer’s Tale in 2009. Castells, “Urban Poverty,” 151. Miller, “Organizer’s Tale,” 1. Castells, “Urban Poverty,” 179.

376 / Notes to Pages 303–311 137. Miller, Community Organizer’s Tale, 221. 138. SPUR to Arington, April 7, 1967; “Meetings Held by the Mission Council,” 6, JS, SFHC. 139. Miller, Community Organizer’s Tale, 217. 140. Ibid., 47. 141. Miller, “Organizer’s Tale,” 146. 142. See, for example ibid., 24. 143. Castells, “Urban Poverty,” 163. 144. Miller himself concedes this point in the postscript of his recent memoir. Community Organizer’s Tale, 266. 145. Miller, “Organizer’s Tale,” 125–26. 146. Castells, “Urban Poverty,” 138. 147. Miller, “Organizer’s Tale,” 1981; ibid., Community Organizer’s Tale; Castells, “Urban Poverty”; Summers Sandoval, Latinos at the Golden Gate, 2013. 148. Miller, Community Organizer’s Tale, 125. 149. Martinez’s remarks were not recorded, or at least have not been made available in any known archive. 150. “Can We Decentralize Decision Making?,” handwritten notes, n.d., box 1, folder 4, JM, SFHC. 151. Ibid. 152. Ibid. 153. Special Assistant to the President for the Planning of Public Works, “Planning for Public Works,” pamphlet, United States Government Printing Office, 1957, 23. 154. Ibid. 155. Ibid. 156. Kent, “City and Regional Planning for the Metropolitan San Francisco Bay Area,” Institute of Governmental Studies, UC Berkeley, 1963, 4–5, box 1, folder 20, TK, SFHC. 157. Handwritten notes on experiences of other cities, n.d., box 1, folder 18, JM, SFHC. 158. “Can We Decentralize Decision Making?,” handwritten notes, n.d., box 1, folder 4; handwritten notes on experiences of other cities, n.d., box 1, folder 18; International City Management Association, “Report on the Task Force on Sense of Community,” August 8, 1970, box 1, folder 5; JM, SFHC. 159. Castells, “Urban Poverty,” 138–39. See also David Diaz, Barrio Urbanism: Chicanos, Planning, and American Cities (New York: Routledge, 2005), 283; and Godfrey, Neighborhoods, 159. 160. Mike Miller himself sometimes referred to phases like these as “slogans.” “Organizer’s Tale,” 116. 161. “Informal leadership” was the language used by Opperman in 1956 to describe the potential for exactly the kind of scenario that the SFRA encountered, where previously silent elements of the community would emerge as leaders at a crucial moment in the planning process. Opperman to Ives, September 28, 1956, RG207. 162. Pence and Gallegos to Morrison, September 26, 1966, JS, SFHC. CONCLUSION

1. 2. 3.

NYT, November 5, 2000. ME: “Housing Authority Act Un-American,” May 24, 1940; “Housing Authority Asked to Reconsider the Two Mission Projects,” May 3, 1940. Exam., May 3, 1940; quoted in Howard, “More than Shelter” (2005), 204. See also

Notes to Pages 311–315 / 377

4.

5. 6.

“Supervisors’ Vote Opposes Mission Housing Project,” Exam., May 7, 1940; and Baranski, “Making Public Housing,” 125. MMNC with the City Demonstration Agency, C-1. See, for example, Call: October 23, 1907; December 3, 1907; December 11, 1907; November 21, 1908; April 30, 1912. Garrioch and Peel, “Introduction,” 663 Longer-form studies include Osofsky, Harlem; Jablonsky, Pride in the Jungle; von Hoffman, Local Attachments; Mooney-Melvin, “Before the Neighborhood Organization Revolution”; Garb, City of Dreams; Seligman, Block by Block; Bachin, Building the South Side.

INDEX

Acme Lumber Company, 84 Addams, Jane, 223 Advisory Water Committee, 75 aesthetic politics, 20, 28 affordable housing, 3, 138, 211, 308. See also public housing African Americans, 128, 212–13, 227; discrimination against, 8, 103, 212–13, 215, 217, 222, 227, 238, 257, 295–96, 373–74n96; housing/home ownership, 138, 152, 159, 164, 190, 202, 211, 215, 233, 240–42, 251, 254; immigration into Mission, 122, 130, 254; organized labor, 236; passing, 215; political representation, 295 Alameda County, 22, 125, 133, 196, 199 Alameda Island, 197 Alien Land Laws (1913 & 1920), 104 Alien Poll Tax (1921), 104 Alinsky, Saul, 13, 26, 267 Alioto, Joseph, 279, 298; Mission Coalition Organization (MCO), 13, 284, 303, 305, 307; Model Cities, 282, 370–71n4 Almendares, Luis, 218 Amador, Donna, 299 American Institute of Architects (Northern California and San Francisco chapters), 77, 200 American Plan (US Steel), 79 Americanness, 89, 117 Anglo Building, 106 Anglo-California Bank, 106 Anglo Land Company, 124, 162

Anglo National California Bank, 153 Anti-Jap Laundry League, 102–3, 104, 107, 108–11, 340n68 anti–public housing campaigns, 7, 12, 136–37, 311. See also public housing projects anti-tenement laws, 182 Apartamentos Betel Complex, 289, 293 appropriations (municipal budget), 42–43, 44, 57, 60, 67 architecture: Bay Area regionalism, 21, 293; Beaux-Arts (neoclassical), 54, 91, 112–14, 117, 135, 341n95; modernist, 144, 188, 265; Spanish colonial, 20–21, 96, 112, 127, 180, 216, 292–93. See also American Institute of Architects; Association for the Improvement and Adornment of San Francisco; Burger and Coplans; Burnham, Daniel; Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM); Howard, John Galen; Mission Promotion Association (MPA): architectural strategies; Napoleon LeBrun & Sons; Okamoto/Liskamm; Pflueger, Timothy; Polk, Willis; Woollett, John; Wright, Frank Lloyd; Wurster, William Arington, Joseph, 275 Army Street. See Cesar Chavez Street Arnold, William, 153 Arnstein, Sherry, 285, 301 artisans, 37 artists, 3, 291, 346n46 Artists Eviction Defense Coalition, 3

380 / Index Asian Americans, 103, 237; business ownership, 107, 108, 109, 340–41n81; discrimination, 8, 28, 101, 102, 104, 106, 110–11, 138, 227, 340n68; housing/ home ownership, 111, 238; immigration, 101, 102, 122; organized labor, 101, 102, 105–6, 221 Asiatic Exclusion League, 102, 110 Association for the Improvement and Adornment of San Francisco, 46, 55 Association of Bay Area Governments, 306 at-large voting, 8, 9, 43, 57 Balboa Park, 64 Baldwin, James, 233, 241 Baltimore, MD, 74, 155, 248, 307 Bancroft, Hubert Howe, 37 Bank of America, 162, 167, 205 Bank of California, 36, 40, 170 Banks, Mattie, 215 Banks v. SFHA, 138, 215 Barrett, Nestor, 193 Bartalini, Jack, 255, 268, 282–83 Basta Ya! restaurant, 301 Bauer, William, 17, 109 Bay Area Crusade, 223 Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), 235, 248, 252, 259–60, 264, 265, 278, 281, 357n81; Bay Area Rapid Transit Commission (BARTC), 193, 206, 207, 208; Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BARTD), 206, 207, 208, 359n121; promotion of, 206–7; residents’ views, 3–4, 181, 207–8, 233, 249, 253, 269, 271, 286, 288–89, 301 Bay Bridge, 126, 196–97, 198, 344–45n7 Bay Cities Water Company, 52 Bayshore Freeway, 6, 177–78, 181, 194, 200, 204, 358n99 Bay Street, 70 Bernal Cut, 73, 204 Bernal Hill, 47 Black Panthers, 298, 299, 301 blight, 240, 247, 252, 253; Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), 155, 212, 213, 233; San Francisco Department of City Planning (DCP), 212, 227; San Francisco Master Plan, 212, 213; San Francisco Planning and Housing

Association (SFPHA), 190, 202, 240; San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA), 227, 233, 240, 243–44; traffic, 191, 201 blue-collar workers, 37, 235 Blyth-Zellerbach Committee (B-Z), 183, 208, 211, 242 Board of Park Commissioners, 77 Board of Underwriters for the Pacific, 67– 68, 82 Boas, Franz, 125 bond issues, 53, 62, 69, 73, 205, 207–8, 248 Boston, 24, 26, 74, 165, 307, 326n19; ethnic/racial politics, 222, 333n14; neighborhood associations, 81, 335n73; neighborhood improvement, 63, 81, 233, 248, 307, 328n43 Bowden, T. H., 153, 158, 160, 162, 164, 348n35 boycotts, 12 Braaten, David, 220, 225, 232, 233 Brannan Street sewer project, 42 Brennan, John, 56 Bridges, Harry, 299 Brilliant, Mark, 26 Brodnik, Joseph, 297, 298 Broussard, Albert, 212 Brown, Arthur, Jr., 135 Brown Berets, 298, 299 Browne, Alan, 205 Bryant Street, 38 Buen Pastor church, 123 Buffalo, NY, 74 building campaigns, 20–21, 80–81 Building Trades Council (BTC), 12, 58, 62, 133, 216, 331n72 Building Trades Temple, 62, 106, 112–13, 135, 140, 180, 217, 238 Burger and Coplans, 293 Burnham, Daniel, 2, 18, 35, 46, 81, 183, 205 Burnham plan, 52, 57, 58, 66, 70, 80–81, 97, 112, 169, 193, 194, 336–37n106; business community, 35, 51; earthquake’s effect, 48, 49; fight over, 28, 51, 53–54, 55, 173, 183, 314; Mission Promotion Association (MPA), 82, 85, 91, 99, 100, 199; neoclassicism, 20; Ruef amendment, 50, 51, 332n86 Busse, Fred, 55

Index / 381 Cahill, Thomas, 296, 298 Cain, Tobbie, 215 California Assembly Committee on Constitutional Amendments, 51 California Building, 94, 144, 338n28 California Department of General Services, 99 California Department of Public Works, 197 California Department of Transportation, 6 California State Emergency Relief Administration (SERA), 125, 143 California State Supreme Court, 215 Californios, 126, 127, 129, 161 capitalism, 128, 182, 183, 281, 299, 300, 302, 314. See also moral capitalism; neighborhood capitalism Capp Street, 47–48, 77, 97, 125, 127, 239 Casey, James, 218, 219 Castro District, 8, 65 Catholic Charities Committee, 237 Catholic parish churches. See Mission parish church; Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe language parish church; St. Anthony’s parish church; St. Peter’s parish church Catholic Society of San Francisco, 87 Cavallo, Luis, 124 Center, George, 41, 43, 44, 51–52, 69–70, 76, 84–86 Central Americans, 13, 22, 125, 130, 224 Central Freeway, 204 Centro Social Obrero, 217, 298 Cerwin, Herbert, 193 Cesar Chavez Street, 37, 68 chain stores, 3 Charley, James, 215 Charter Convention (August 1896), 43 charter reform, 8, 43, 57 Chavez, Cesar, 292, 295, 302 Chavez Ravine, 265, 307, 308 Chicago, 9, 35, 46, 92, 354n23; business community, 57, 143, 208, 209; Commercial Club, 55, 56, 57; mortgage lending, 156, 157, 163, 165; neighborhood associations, 267, 307, 337n120, 359n128, 359n131; race relations, 26, 157, 159, 163, 222, 238; real estate interests, 148, 152, 159, 190. See also Chicago Department of City Planning;

Chicago Housing Authority; Chicago plan (Burnham); Chicago Plan Commission Chicago Department of City Planning, 80 Chicago Housing Authority, 190 Chicago plan (Burnham), 54–55, 56, 57, 80–81, 208 Chicago Plan Commission, 80–81, 208 child welfare, 192 Chinatown, 1, 14, 103, 108, 133, 138, 147, 167, 243, 251, 291, 299, 346n50 Chinese, 15, 147, 329n11 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 101 Chinese lottery. See gambling Christopher, George, 191, 201, 207, 245 Churchill, F. J., 69, 71–72, 91, 101 citizenship, 2, 104, 141, 224 City Beautiful Districts, 66, 225 City Demonstration Program, 254, 255– 56. See also Model Cities City Front Federation, 45 City Front strike (1901), 45 City Planning Commission, 81, 111, 184; Mission Promotion Association (MPA), 71, 77; transportation improvements, 199, 202 Civic League of Improvement Clubs, 45, 66, 76 Civil Rights Act (1964), 274 civil rights movement, 152, 215, 234, 257, 277, 296 class mobility, 112, 314 closed-shop environments, 50, 63 Cogswell public housing project, 136, 137 Coit Tower, 144 Colegio de la Misión, 291 collective bargaining, 142 Collier-Burns Highway Act (1947), 194 colonialism, 292 Coltrane, John, 241 Committee of Forty. See San Francisco Committee on Reconstruction Commonwealth Club, 46, 60 Community Development Corporations, 7, 285 Community Redevelopment Act (California), 184 Community Reinvestment Act (California), 7

382 / Index Community Service Organization (CSO), 246 condominium conversions, 3 Confederation of Brown Race for Action (COBRA), 298, 299, 300, 302 Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), 182–83, 192 conservation, 212, 213, 247, 248 conservative business interests, 2, 35, 51–52, 62 Construction and Building Workers, Local 216, 217 construction industry, 149 construction unions, 7, 236 Corona, Rosalio, 123, 125 Crane, Flor de Maria, 283 creative federalism, 253, 306, 308 crime rates, 3, 191, 233, 239 Crocker, Charles, 169 Crocker, William, 169 Crocker Amazon Tract, 111 Crocker First National Bank, 167, 183, 362n7 Crocker Langley Directory, 123, 125, 138, 345n25 Crowley, D. O., 51, 76, 86, 91 Crown Zellerbach Corporation, 184, 213 cultural identity, 2, 3, 91, 111, 233, 290–91, 297, 307, 315 cultural labor, 83 Cursillo movement, 237 Daly City, 204, 207 Danish Methodist Episcopal church, 96, 127 Davis, Miles, 241 De Leuw Cather Company, 194, 356n64 Demonstration Cities Act (1966), 253, 254, 255. See also Model Cities Denver, 39, 316 Diamond Heights, 240, 241, 289 discrimination: building trades, 216, 217, 236; city agencies, 211, 212, 236, 245, 257. See also African Americans: discrimination; Asian Americans: discrimination; Latinos: discrimination; Mexicans: discrimination; public housing projects: discrimination disinvestment, 27, 148, 150, 157, 164, 216, 222

displacement, 268, 269, 271, 281, 308, 314; accommodation of displaced people, 33, 233, 241, 248, 289; Latinos, 243, 265, 301, 266n117; lower and working classes, 3–4, 14, 253, 265. See also Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition district elections, 8 Dobbs, Harold, 247 Dog Patch, 3 Dolan, Arthur, 205, 208 Dollar Limit, 41, 42–43 Dolores Park, 1, 44 Dolores Street, 1, 20, 44, 47, 48 dot-com boom, 3 Downtown Association, 84–85, 89, 191, 201, 203, 208 Down Town Property Owners’ Association, 85 Dunne, William J., 17, 39, 109–10 Dynamic American City, The (film), 181 earthquake (1906), 1, 4, 9, 17, 33, 35, 48, 92, 281 earthquake love, 33 Eighteenth Street, 44, 96 El Borrego restaurant, 216 El Capitan theater, 92, 112 elderly residents, 6, 239, 242, 295 El Imparcial, 124, 125, 143, 162, 172 Embarcadero Freeway, 194, 200, 201, 210 eminent domain, 35, 48, 50, 177, 184, 240, 289 Episcopal Diocese of California, 223 Equal Opportunity Act (1964), 251 ethnicity: assimilation, 22, 125, 164, 223, 224, 290–91; identity politics, 4, 21– 22, 112, 121, 277, 280, 290–91, 314; multiethnic coalitions, 18, 21, 22, 23, 279, 29, 212; transitional nature, 25, 360n23. See also African Americans; Asian Americans; Californios; Central Americans; Chinese; Filipinos; German; Irish; Italians; Latinos; Mexicans; Spanishness; whiteness Fairmont Hotel, 116 Fair Oaks Parking Association, 178 Fanon, Frantz, 299 Farana, Nicolas, 218

Index / 383 farmworker movement, 22, 295 Farris, George, 114, 115 Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB), 150, 152, 170, 349n39 Federal Housing Administration (FHA), 148–50, 151, 152, 154–57, 159, 162– 63, 170, 171–72, 268, 347nn6–8, 349– 50n48, 350n49, 352n110, 353n127 Federally Aided Code Enforcement (FACE), 268 Federal Public Housing Administration (PHA), 138 Federated Harbor Improvement Associations, 84 Federation of Mission Improvement Clubs, 44, 57, 60 Fennimore, W. D., 86 Fergus, Corwin, 153 Ferry Building, 54, 200, 205 Festivals of San Francisco, The, 142 Fiesta de la Raza, 130 Filipinos, 143, 159, 371n10 Fillmore District, 4, 14, 138, 158, 161, 164, 167, 190, 233, 241, 243, 257, 265, 308 Fillmore Street, 91 fire (1906), 1, 4, 9, 17, 33, 35, 48, 92, 281 First Steps to a Master Plan for San Francisco, 172, 184 Folsom Street, 38, 43, 44 Folsom Street Improvement Club, 43 Forbes, E. A., 99 Fourteenth Amendment, 215, 238 Fourteenth Street, 37, 38, 39, 47, 70, 97, 171, 238 freeway construction, 192, 193–94, 196, 201–2, 235; in the Mission, 168, 169, 173, 181, 203; political power relations, 200, 210, 231; reactions to, 6, 25, 202, 203, 204, 258; revolts, 7, 11, 181, 196, 201–3, 208, 278, 309, 315, 357nn91–92. See also Bayshore Freeway; Central Freeway; Embarcadero Freeway; Mission Freeway; freeway revolts Galería de la Raza, 291, 292 Gallegos, Herman, 254, 265, 267, 271, 272 gambling, 110, 128, 341n84 Gamio, Manuel, 130 garbage collection, 15, 289

Garrioch, David, 25, 315 Geary-Fillmore, 190, 202, 213 General Neighborhood Renewal Project, 247 General Strike (1934), 299 Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan (1907), 102 gentrification, 2, 3, 4, 25, 269 Germans, 36, 159, 217, 222 German Savings Bank, 112 Giannini, A. P., 167, 348n35 Gillette, James, 69, 70–71 Glen Park, 204, 357n91, 358n98 Golden Gate Bridge, 191, 207, 344–45n7 Golden Gate Park, 46, 64, 100 Golden Gateway, 240, 241 Gomez, Jose, 220 Gompers, Samuel, 147, 346n39 Good Samaritans, 222 Grady, Henry, 38 graft, 10, 50, 52, 55–56, 62, 78 Grant Avenue, 38 Great Depression, 6, 10, 131, 132, 315 Greater Mission Citizens’ Council, 225, 249, 276 Greater Mission Neighborhood Council, 246 Great Society, 7, 11, 13, 23, 28, 234, 257, 279, 281, 298, 314, 315 Griffin, Everett, 270 Griffith, Alice, 137 Groat, M. F., 254 Groves, Asa, 155 Guérin, Jules, 55 Guerrero Street, 37, 38, 123, 238 Guevara, Che, 299 Gutiérrez, David, 122, 129 Hagan, James, 219–20, 221, 295, 299, 375n126 Hagan, Philomene, 77 Haight-Ashbury District, 3, 5, 17 Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council, 201 Hamlin, Edith, 144 Harrison Street, 38 Harte, Bret, 88 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène (Baron), 18, 35, 46, 54 Hennessey, Timothy, 218, 219

384 / Index Herman, Justin, 259, 278, 282; Mission Council on Redevelopment (MCOR), 272, 273, 277, 369n46; neighborhood planning, 11, 247–48, 250, 269–70, 271, 303; San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA), 242, 245, 269–70, 371n5 Hetch Hetchy, 74, 75 Hibernia Bank, 112 Highway Acts (1954 and 1956), 194 Highway Right-of-Way Acquisition Fund, 194 Holiday, Billie, 241 Holly Courts public housing project, 135, 138, 139, 345n24, 345–46n30 Holly Park and Mission Street Improvement Club, 43 home industry movement, 63 Home Owners’ Loan Act (1933), 149 Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), 148–50, 151, 153–54, 347n20, 347–48n21, 348–49n37, 349n39, 349nn43–44, 350n53; Federal Housing Authority (FHA), 149, 150, 154– 56, 349–50n48, 350n49; minority neighborhoods, 152, 157–66, 190, 212–13, 233, 348n24, 350n69, 351n85, 352n110; no-lining, 149, 166–70, 180, 188, 204, 213, 216, 233, 235, 353n115; racial politics, 22, 27, 124, 190, 351n74; redlining, 27, 149, 151–52, 154–55, 166–67, 347–48n21, 350n68, 351n85 Hong Kong Derby. See gambling House of Refuge lot, 64 Housing Act (1934), 149, 156, 162, 163, 240 Housing Act (1949), 184, 239, 274 Housing Act (1954), 240 Housing Act (1965), 269 Housing and Urban Development Act (1965), 240 Howard, John Galen, 99 Howard Street, 37, 38, 47, 48, 87, 97, 106, 166 Hoyt, Homer, 154, 156, 159 Hunters Point, 251, 254, 255, 256, 274, 296 Iglesia Baustista Mexicana, 125, 127 Immigration Act (1924), 102, 339n47

imperialism, 89, 299 imperialist nostalgia, 89, 144, 217, 224 improvement club movement, 44, 45, 59– 60, 64, 66, 78, 82 income inequality, 25 India Basin Act, 69 India Basin Association. See Islais Creek Inland Harbor Association industrial capital, 59, 70, 183 Ingleside Terraces, 111, 327n33 Inner Sunset, 3 insurance rates, 58, 59, 67, 68, 70, 75, 80 intercommunalism, 299. See also Third World Liberation movement Irish, 12, 36–37, 92, 159, 218–21, 237, 329n11 Islais Creek, 68, 69, 75, 84, 199 Islais Creek Inland Harbor Association, 68, 69 Italians, 12, 14, 36, 157, 159, 164–65, 190, 219, 240 Jacobs, Jane, 258; The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 24, 258 Jamaica Plain Citizens’ Association (Boston), 81 Japan-U.S. relations, 101–2, 104, 107 Jarvis, Birney, 297 Jews, 222 Jim Crow laws, 102, 213 Johnson, Hiram, 52 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 11, 22, 234, 308 Joint Army-Navy Board, 197, 205 Kelleher, Edward and Elizabeth, 177–78, 194 Kelley, George F., 76, 77 Kennedy, John F., 248 Kent, T. J., 252, 254, 255, 256, 274, 277, 306, 308 King, Cameron, 102 Kriegsfeld, Irving, 224, 277 Labor Clarion, 62, 106, 116, 140, 141, 142, 143, 180 Labor Council Temple, 112 labor terrorism, 78 La Cronica, 127 La Cumbre restaurant, 216

Index / 385 Lamb, Captain, 77, 103 Lansburgh, G. Albert, 92 Latinos, 223–24, 237, 277, 279–80, 295, 302, 314; business ownership, 124, 125, 126; Catholicism, 123, 237; demographics, 215, 231–32, 237, 238, 290; discrimination, 128, 129, 130, 211, 224, 295–96, 300; housing, 243, 252, 265, 290–91; identity indeterminacy, 126– 30, 238, 292; immigration into Mission, 121–30, 290–91; organized labor, 217, 220–21, 236; police relations, 296, 297, 298, 299 Latin Quarter, 14, 15, 123, 125, 338n12 Leese, Jacob, 143 legitimacy (political), 15, 20, 76, 117, 216 Liberty Hill, 37 libraries, 58, 249 lighting, 2, 44, 60, 124 Lincoln Terrace (St. Louis), 158 Little, Arthur D., 245 lockouts, 12, 45 longshoremen, 45, 299 Los Angeles, 4, 39, 133, 299; affordable housing, 3, 165; ethnic and racial identity, 3, 26–27, 157–58, 238; Latina/Latino immigration, 126, 158, 159, 164, 238, 265; real estate industry, 153, 158, 159–60, 163; urban renewal, 307, 308 Los Angeles Community Service Organization (CSO), 265 Los Angeles Times, 79 Los Siete de la Raza, 298, 299, 300, 301–2, 314 low-income housing, 11, 260, 265, 289, 294, 308 Lure of San Francisco: A Romance amid Old Landmarks, The (Potter and Gray), 88, 144, 160 Lyon, Richard, 142 Magee, Thomas, 169 Magnin, Cyril, 205 Maguire, A. B., 43, 44, 51 managed economy, 281, 314 Marina District, 4, 157, 190 Market Street, 38, 46, 78, 86, 97, 133, 168, 180, 205, 206, 217, 247, 358n98 Martinez, Ben, 294, 305

Martinez, Maria, 238 Marx, Karl, 299 Masten & Hurd, 140 McCarthy, John, 271, 272 McCarthy, P. H., 70, 73–74, 78, 133, 142, 169, 272, 329n13 McClure, M. F., 99 McCulloch, I. S., 136 McEnerney, C. L., 69 McGoran, Paul, 298 McNab, Gavin, 74 McWilliams, Carey, 27 Mendez v. Westminster, 22 Merced, Lake, 46, 75 merchants’ associations, 11, 179, 202, 216, 245, 277–78, 308, 315 Merchants’ Exchange, 84, 85 mestizos, 122–23, 128, 129, 138 Metropolitan Life tower, 114 Metson, William, 72 Mexican American Political Association (MAPA), 254 Mexicans, 88, 142, 143, 219, 224, 237, 265, 343n16, 371n10, 374n118; business ownership, 140, 161, 216, 343n14; demographics, 121, 130, 138, 343n20; discrimination, 22, 87, 138–39, 157–58, 159–61, 163, 238, 292, 300, 344n41; immigration into Mission, 122–27, 128, 131, 164 middle classes, 3–4, 191, 242, 314, 333n16; housing, 235; Latinos, 127, 162; values, 63, 142, 192; whites, 139, 172 military installations, 10, 96–97, 99 Milk, Harvey, 8 Miller, Mike, 267, 268, 271, 283, 302, 303, 304–5 minority communities, 3, 27, 296–97 Mision de Completo Evangelio church, 127 Misión San Francisco de Asís, 1, 20 Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition, 3, 314 Mission Area Community Action Board (MACABI), 251, 252, 315 Mission Bank, 5, 40, 51, 61, 93, 96, 170 Mission Branch Library, 92 Mission Carnival, 90, 91 Mission Coalition Organization (MCO), 6, 9, 13, 279, 282, 314, 360n26

386 / Index Mission Community Center, 223 Mission Council on Redevelopment (MCOR), 259–60, 267–74, 277–78, 279, 281, 282–84, 375n134 Mission District: alleged accent, 4, 39; building boom, 71, 231, 233; city within a city ethos, 4–5, 11, 18, 20, 41, 56, 61, 67, 83, 91, 117, 134–35, 210, 225–26, 234, 280–81, 305, 309; diversity, 8, 142, 220, 222, 226, 232, 285–86; vs. downtown, 17, 18; as elite suburb, 4, 56, 91; neighborhood-based planning, 6–7, 25, 28, 133, 212, 231, 233, 267–78, 282– 87, 315; race relations, 211, 215, 220–21, 224; retail corridor, 39, 196, 202, 203; self-sufficiency, 38, 39, 61 Mission District Renewal Commission, 249 Mission Dolores, 86–87, 88, 91, 92, 96, 117, 127, 133, 143–44, 171, 292; cemetery, 41 Mission Enterprise, 4, 137, 207, 311 Mission Fiesta. See Mission Carnival Mission Freeway, 194, 199, 202–3, 204, 207 Mission High School, 44, 73, 144 Mission Housing Development Corporation (MHDC), 6, 279, 284–285, 289– 90, 292–94, 305, 307, 314 Mission Improvement Union, 43, 44, 57, 60 Mission Merchants’ Association (MMA), 5, 197, 199, 217, 233, 235, 253, 259, 261– 62, 267; freeway construction, 178, 181, 194, 202, 208; labor relations, 12, 86, 136; Mission Promotion Association (MPA), 65, 72–73, 83, 90, 315; political power, 9, 76, 130, 137, 147, 246, 249– 50, 260, 271, 276, 282, 307–8; public housing concerns, 6, 135–36, 311 Mission Merchants’ News, 4, 139, 171, 172 Mission Mirror, 4 Mission Model Neighborhood Corporation (MMNC), 6, 291–92, 297, 304, 305, 372n39, 372n61, 373n65; economic development, 286, 287, 288; planning authority, 279, 284–85, 307; redevelopment issues, 289, 290, 294 Mission Neighborhood Centers (MNC), 226, 237, 246, 253, 267, 276, 277, 285, 305, 315; cultural programming, 223,

224; Latinos, 224, 225, 314; revitalization efforts, 5, 212, 225, 233–34, 247– 48, 249, 257, 259–60, 269, 271, 308 Mission parish church, 87 Mission Park. See Dolores Park Mission Promotion Association (MPA), 5, 51, 60, 90–91, 117, 132, 142, 183, 188, 202, 209, 216, 225, 333n2; architectural strategies, 20, 84, 94, 96–97, 111; Burnham plan opposition, 35, 52–53, 54, 56, 80, 85, 99–100, 112; bylaws, 60–61, 64; discursive strategies, 83–84, 86, 116; insurance rates battles, 58, 59, 67–68, 70, 75, 80–81; labor alliances, 12, 63, 74, 105, 116, 121, 314, 241– 42n103; Law and Order Committee, 78, 79; leadership, 82, 85, 99, 105–6; planning initiatives, 12, 58, 71–73, 208, 231; political power, 5, 10, 57, 59, 64– 67, 74–75, 82, 83, 137, 147, 196, 199; racist policies, 103, 116; transportation planning, 51, 65, 97–98, 101, 178, 197, 208; values, 63. See also Islais Creek Inland Harbor Association Mission Rebels in Action, 298, 302 Mission Relief Association, 48, 51 Mission Savings Bank, 5, 40, 51, 61, 93, 96 Mission Street, 38, 47–48, 73, 92, 96, 97, 171, 196, 202, 207, 235, 244, 248–49, 261, 288, 358n98 Mission Terrace, 111, 112, 162 Mission Trails Fiesta, 171 Mitty, John, 123 Model Cities, 6, 274, 285, 302–3, 307; funding, 29, 272, 275, 292; Mission application, 282, 283–84, 285, 305, 308, 371n5; neighborhood-based planning, 11, 22–23, 234, 253, 254, 256, 279, 306, 308; Nixon administration, 6, 9, 11, 282, 294, 309; rehabilitation focus, 240, 257, 284; resistance to, 255, 256, 257, 282–83 Monk, Thelonius, 241 Montgomery, Ulysses, 271 monuments, 35, 46 Moore, Charles, 293 moral capitalism, 143 Morrison, Jack, 305, 306, 307 Moses, Robert, 258

Index / 387 multiethnicity, 18, 21–23, 27, 29, 121, 144, 212, 220, 279–80, 295, 309, 314 multi-family dwellings, 38, 352n97 municipal governments, 180, 199, 245, 252, 272, 370n1; centralized planning authority, 2, 5, 23, 305; funding priorities, 73, 139, 288, 309; neighborhood relations, 81, 178; nongovernmental connections, 56, 183, 196; resistance to, 10, 24, 57, 77, 252, 257, 275 Municipal Swimming Pool, 77 murals, 144, 145, 291 Murdoch, Norman, 244 Mussen, Irwin, 250 Napoleon III, 18, 46 Napoleon LeBrun & Sons, 114 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 306 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 215, 216, 254 National Commission on Urban Problems, 306 National Federation of Settlements and Neighborhood Centers, 223 nativism, 101–2, 141–42 neighborhood-based planning, 6–7, 25, 28, 131, 133, 212, 231, 233, 267, 278, 282, 315 neighborhood capitalism, 59, 61, 68, 70, 73, 82, 134, 147, 182–83, 314 neighborhood identity, 21, 121, 311 neighborhood organizing, 13, 276, 277 neighborhoods as social processes, 25 New Deal, 11, 12, 144, 146, 180, 199, 227; citizen/state relationship, 10, 140; organized labor, 142, 147; private-sector connections, 148, 171–72, 192; public works projects, 20–21, 27, 131, 134–35, 146, 182, 209; racial politics, 143, 147, 172, 221 New Mission/Nueva Misión, 4, 239, 285, 297, 285, 297 Newsletter of the Civic League of Improvement Clubs, 76 newspaper editorial boards, 7, 200 New York City, 14, 26, 114, 235, 248, 258– 59, 328n43

Nicaraguans, 219, 237 Nicol, Margaret, 35 Nineteenth Street, 48, 177, 360n18 Ninth Street, 91, 204 Nixon, Richard M., 6, 11, 240, 282, 287, 294, 302, 304 Nob Hill, 1, 27, 70, 115, 149, 158 Noe Valley Defense Club, 43 North, Henry, 205 North Beach, 1, 15, 123, 126, 130, 215, 240 North of Army Promotion Club, 65 Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe Spanishlanguage parish church, 122, 123 O’Connell, John, 296 O’Riley, Luke, 220 O’Shaughnessy, M. M., 75 Oakland, CA, 194, 197, 299, 353n123; economic development, 133, 198; home ownership/housing, 153, 165, 238, 248, 349n39; San Francisco relationship, 39, 133, 197–98, 205–6, 344–45n7, 357n81 Oakland Chamber of Commerce, 198 Obreros caucus, 217, 263, 267, 282 Ocean Avenue, 64 Okamoto/Liskamm, 249, 253, 260, 265, 268, 269, 285, 289, 300, 308 Older, Fremont, 52 open-shop campaigns, 12, 15, 62, 78, 79, 85, 143, 169 Operating Engineers Local Union 3, 247 Opperman, Paul, 199, 203, 205, 245, 246, 376n161 Organization for Business Economic and Community Advancement (OBECA)/ Arriba Juntos (Upward Together), 237, 239, 267, 283, 298 Organized Labor, 62, 114, 142, 143 Orozco, José, 291 Pacific Heights, 8, 15 Palace Hotel Company, 116 Palacios, Lawrence, 270 Panama Pacific Exposition (1915), 85, 88, 104, 106, 116, 127 Paris, 18, 35, 46 parks, 18, 35, 40, 43–44, 46, 54, 58, 59, 80, 244, 249, 268, 285, 289

388 / Index Peel, Mark, 25, 315 Pence, Jerry, 271 Pentecostal churches, 13, 123, 124, 127, 218 Peralta Improvement Club, 65 Pettus, Reggie, 14 Pflueger, Timothy, 38 Phelan, James, 37, 48, 49, 52–53, 78, 87, 91, 104, 133, 307, 329n13, 336– 37n106; Association for the Improvement and Adornment of San Francisco, 46, 55; improvement clubs relations, 44, 45; labor connections, 43, 44, 45, 62, 74, 103 Pine Street, 70 Ping Yuen public housing project, 138 Playground Commission, 76, 77 Point Lobos Improvement Club, 41 political coalitions, 2, 15, 58 political instability, 10 political machines, 7, 15, 50 political patronage, 72, 75, 76, 77, 78, 277, 294 Polk, Willis, 48, 54, 66, 92 port of San Francisco, 54, 59, 69, 80, 86, 285 Portolá, Gaspar de, 89, 160 Portolá Festival, 89, 90, 91 Potrero Boulevard, 47, 353n115 Potrero Hill, 157, 358n98 Precita Valley Community Club Association, 222 Preparedness Bombing Day, 78 Presidio, 88, 160 private property, 33, 50, 52, 139, 345– 46n30 progressive businesspeople, 35, 49, 58, 63, 73–74, 78 Progressive charter reform, 8 Progressive Labor Party, 268 Property-Owners’ Association of San Francisco, 201 property taxes, 41, 132, 181, 355n47. See also Dollar Limit property values, 22, 51, 53, 136, 164, 178, 198, 200, 201, 209, 243 Protestant churches, 123 PTA (Parent-Teacher Association), 24, 179, 316 public housing projects, 20, 24, 134, 135– 36, 138, 143, 240, 279; discrimination,

164, 215; objections to, 6, 7, 139, 140, 248–49, 311, 315; support for, 12, 137, 139, 140, 289. See also Apartamentos Betel; Cogswell; Holly Courts; Ping Yuen; Regal Pale; Valencia Gardens; Westside Courts Public Schools Defense Association, 72 public utilities, 15, 255 Public Works Administration (PWA), 134, 140–42, 143, 147, 170, 172, 227 Puerto Ricans, 219 Quinn, Frank, 39, 110–11, 341n84 race relations, 2, 26, 103, 316 racial covenants, 22, 111, 158, 238 racial identity, 23, 25 Radin, Paul, 125, 128, 129, 130 rail connections, 5, 44, 54, 61, 198 Rapid Transit Corridor Study, 244, 252, 268 Raza youth groups, 267, 282, 283, 296 real estate interests, 12, 27, 37, 136, 150, 183 real estate speculation, 3, 260, 283, 308, 311 Real Property Survey, 1939 (WPA), 124, 161, 162, 166, 342n6, 343n16, 353n115 Recreation Park, 135, 329n7 redevelopment, 26, 29, 242, 243, 245, 250, 252, 260, 277, 288, 363n54; blight, 212, 215, 240, 249; residential projects, 233, 241; resistance, 246, 247, 248, 255–56, 258–59, 269, 272, 308–9, 365n103. See also Community Redevelopment Act; Mission Council on Redevelopment (MCOR); San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA); urban renewal Regal Pale public housing project, 293, 294 rehabilitation, 242–43, 244, 256, 274, 278, 281, 285, 308, 363n54, 365n103; blight, 212, 215; community-based, 247–50, 253, 257, 259, 276; funding, 260, 269, 270, 284, 364n79; residential projects, 268, 289, 294–95 rent supplements, 240, 260, 270, 271 Republican Party, 38, 68, 74, 116, 250 Residential Survey of San Francisco (HOLC), 22, 149, 150–51, 153, 156, 161, 166, 349nn38–39

Index / 389 Responsible Merchants, Property Owners and Tenants Association, 255, 268, 282 R. G. Hamilton & Co. Real Estate, 167 Richmond District, 168 Rincon Hill, 126 Rivera, Diego, 291 Robinson, Elmer, 177, 198, 205, 206, 207–8 Rodriguez, Isaura Michell de, 123, 218 Rolph, James, Jr., 36–40, 48–49, 85–86, 89, 91, 133, 332n81; Asian immigration, 103, 106, 111; commitment to Mission, 2, 4–5, 17, 56, 189; as mayor, 135, 142, 178, 250; Mission Bank, 5, 40, 61; Mission Promotion Association (MPA), 51, 53, 57, 60, 69–70, 73–82; Mission Savings Bank, 5, 61 Rolph, James, Sr., 35, 36 Roos, Robert, 62, 63 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 154 Roosevelt, Theodore, 101, 102 Rosaldo, Renato, 89 Ross, John, 268 rotary clubs, 24, 316 Ruef, Abraham, 52, 332n86; bribery, 50, 52, 56, 336–37n106; Union Labor Party (ULP), 45, 49–51 Russian Hill, 1, 70, 71 Russo-Japanese War (1905), 104 Sailor’s Union, 45 Salem Swedish Baptist church, 127 Salvadorans, 219, 237 Samuel Gompers Trade School, 140, 141, 147, 164, 180 San Francisco Bank, 167, 349–50n48, 353n118 San Francisco Board of Supervisors, 9, 192, 252, 255–56, 260, 274, 276–77, 308; economic development, 108, 198, 249– 50; relationship with Mission, 41, 42, 53, 57, 64, 67, 83, 272–73; transportation development, 177, 197, 199, 203, 258 San Francisco Call, 75, 177 San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, 6, 77, 133, 183, 184, 198, 301, 366n126; Mission Promotion Association (MPA), 17, 79, 84–85, 86; organized labor

relations, 12, 78, 79, 116; transportation improvement plans, 197, 198, 199, 203, 208. See also Oakland Chamber of Commerce; U.S. Chamber of Commerce San Francisco Chronicle, 5, 50, 132, 172 San Francisco City Planning Commission, 10, 44, 59, 81, 184, 274, 355n53; Mission Promotion Association (MPA), 71, 77, 82; race issues, 111, 353n115; transportation policy, 189, 194, 196, 199, 202, 205–6 San Francisco Civic Center, 14, 20, 38, 53–54, 97, 99, 101, 247, 332n92 San Francisco Committee on Reconstruction, 49, 52–53, 55, 80, 331n72 San Francisco Community Renewal Plan, 246, 248 San Francisco Department of City Planning (DCP), 80, 183, 187, 211, 226, 288, 355n53 San Francisco Department of Public Works, 43, 168, 198, 199 San Francisco Economic Opportunity Council (EOC), 234, 251, 252, 256, 257, 275 San Francisco Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, 236 San Francisco Health Department, 107, 108, 111, 167 San Francisco Housing Association. See San Francisco Planning and Housing Association San Francisco Housing Authority (SFHA), 6, 137, 139, 182, 191–92, 247, 345– 46n30; federal cooperation, 134, 227, 355n47; labor relations, 147; race issues, 124, 137–38, 211, 215–16; resistance to, 137–38, 248–49. See also public housing projects San Francisco Human Resources Development Center, 235 San Francisco Human Rights Commission (HRC), 234, 251, 252, 256, 257, 272, 275 San Francisco Labor Council (SFLC), 58, 62, 104, 140, 180, 194, 198, 238–39, 282; Mission Merchants’ Association, 12, 116, 342–43n103; Mission Promotion Association (MPA), 12, 63

390 / Index San Francisco Land Use Plan, 193, 202, 358n98 San Francisco Master Plan, 193, 212 San Francisco Municipal Report, 92 San Francisco National Guard armory, 70– 71, 96, 239 San Francisco Parks Department, 17, 72, 255 San Francisco Planning and Housing Association (SFPHA), 192, 201, 226; economic policies, 183, 187–91; federal cooperation, 184, 208, 240; racial politics, 202, 211, 213 San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal Association (SPUR), 203, 242, 256, 273, 274, 275, 303, 367n145; economic policies, 183, 366n126; racial politics, 238, 276, 290–91, 296 San Francisco Real Estate Board, 70, 77, 111 San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA), 184, 239, 240, 244, 245, 248, 250, 253–54, 258, 260, 263, 265, 282, 294, 308, 309, 366n128, 366–67n130, 367n145, 367n161; Mission Coalition Organization (MCO), 287, 293, 301, 303, 305; Mission Council on Redevelopment (MCOR), 272, 273, 278, 281; Mission Model Neighborhood Corporation (MMNC), 288, 289; Mission Neighborhood Centers (MNC), 223, 225–26, 234, 246–47, 259, 260; Model Cities, 255, 371n5; Okamoto/ Liskamm plan, 260, 263, 265, 267–69, 285; racial politics, 211–12, 215, 227, 233, 242, 243, 257; resistance to, 13, 14, 21, 29, 240–41, 246, 259, 268, 274–77, 300, 314; total planning issues, 10–11, 270–71, 307; Western Addition, 242–43, 248, 257 San Francisco Savings & Loan Society, 112 San Francisco School Board, 17, 72, 102, 147, 178 San Francisco State University, 32 San Francisco Superior Court, 215 San Francisco Trafficways Plan (1951), 193, 203 San Francisco Unified School District, 140, 141, 192 San Gabriel Wash, 159

San Jose, CA, 39 San Jose Avenue, 48, 64 San Mateo County, 133, 197, 199, 206, 207, 359n121 Schmitz, Eugene, 45, 49–50, 52, 73, 76, 78, 142, 183, 336–37n106 Seattle, 39, 158, 159, 164–65, 169, 210, 316, 328n43, 352n10 Second Street, 38 Second Vatican Council (1962), 218 Security Builders, 238 Segoe, Ladislas, 194, 356n64 Self, Robert, 26, 362n72 settlement houses, 7, 223, 224, 277, 385, 308 Seventeenth Street, 37, 96, 124, 127 Seventeenth Street Church, 343n17 sewers, 5, 40, 42, 44, 60, 67, 80, 146, 190 Sheet Metal Workers’ Hall, 112 Shelley, John “Jack,” 250, 253, 255, 272, 273, 284 Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), 238 Shima, George, 103 Silicon Valley, 3, 18, 314 single-family dwellings, 37, 38, 156, 166, 171, 222, 352n97 Siqueiros, David, 291 Sixteenth Street, 20, 40, 42, 60, 106, 123, 207, 239, 260–61 Sixteenth Street Improvement Club, 41, 42, 43, 57 skilled labor, 37, 38, 141, 220 slum clearance, 6, 54, 181, 240, 249. See also redevelopment; urban renewal Sorro, Rich, 302 Southern Civic Clubs, 197 Southern Crossing, 194, 196–99, 205, 356n71, 357n81 Southern Pacific hospital, 70 Southern Pacific railroad, 18, 73, 108, 169, 199, 331n72 South of Market District, 1, 36, 38, 58, 62, 126, 167–68, 204, 242, 243, 245, 247, 308 South Side Improvement Club, 43 South Van Ness Street, 37 Spackman, Ena Aguirre, 283 Spanishness, 89, 91, 127, 171 Spanish Pentecostal Church, 127 spatial politics, 137, 143

Index / 391 special assessment districts, 41, 53 Spokane, WA, 159, 164, 351n85, 352n110, 353n123 Spreckels, Adolph, 41 Spreckels, John D., 37 Spreckels, Rudolph, 52 Spring Valley Water Company, 74, 75 Sproul, Robert, 38 St. Anthony’s parish church, 217, 218, 356n71 St. Francis Wood, 111, 327n33 St. Peter’s parish church, 123, 218, 219, 237, 295, 301, 315, 375n126 Stark, Irene Jensen, 36 Stoddard, H. L., 84 streetcars, 38, 50, 52, 73, 78 street lighting, 2, 44, 60 street repaving, 2, 44, 268, 54, 56 street widening, 35, 44, 47–48, 197, 356n71 strikes, 10, 12, 45, 61–62, 79, 101, 283, 299, 302, 346n44. See also City Front Strike (1901); General Strike (1934) strong mayor system, 8 suburbs/suburbanization, 4, 22, 56, 91, 111, 156, 170–72, 180, 184, 187, 190, 192, 194, 196, 198, 201, 206, 210, 221– 22, 227–28, 235, 301 Sullivan, Matthew, 38, 48, 52, 56, 70, 74, 99, 111, 133, 311; Mission Promotion Association (MPA), 51, 53, 57, 60, 67–68, 69, 75, 76, 77, 85, 189, 205; Mission Savings Bank, 40, 61 Sunset District, 201, 207, 297 Sunshine School, 145 Taft, William Howard, 89 tax revenue, 10, 42, 55, 73, 177, 190, 192, 207, 212, 240, 297; rate increases, 52, 69, 78, 209, 336–37n106; self-taxation, 41, 51. See also Dollar Limit; property taxes Taylor, Edward Robeson, 52 Teamsters, 55 technology firms, 3 Telegraph Hill, 14, 88, 338n12 Telesis, 182 Tenants Union, 268 Tenderloin, 1

Terrazo Helpers Local No. 115, 216 Third World Liberation movement. See Black Panthers; Brown Berets; Confederation of Brown Race for Action (COBRA); Los Siete de la Raza; Mission Rebels in Action Thirteenth Street, 97 Thomas Magee & Sons Real Estate, 167, 169 Tile Helpers Local No. 7, 216 Tinney, Joseph, 220 total planning, 10 transportation planning, 181, 301, 314 Traschler, Louis, 77 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 21, 161 Tuolumne River, 74 Turn Verein Hall, 96 Tuttle, Elba, 283 Twelfth Street, 38, 166 Twentieth Street, 37, 207 Twenty-Fifth Street, 28, 48 Twenty-First Street, 87, 335n74, 342–43n11 Twenty-Second Street, 37, 140, 207, 342– 43n11, 353n115 Twenty-Sixth Street, 37, 337n74 Twin Peaks, 36, 46, 64, 177, 358n98 underdevelopment, 25 unemployment, 107, 134, 149, 239 Union Labor administration, 35, 49 Union Labor Party (ULP), 45, 62, 133, 238, 331n72, 336–37n106 United Bay Area Crusade, 237 United Farm Workers of America (UFW), 295 United Railroads Company, 51–52, 79, 336–37n106 University of Chicago, 125 Unobstructed View law, 109 unskilled labor, 242, 300 upper-class housing, 235 urbanization, 25 Urban League, 254 urban planning: centralization/decentralization of power, 28, 82, 91, 150, 166– 70, 180, 315; environmental considerations, 25, 158, 180, 182, 192, 212, 216, 239, 289, 292, 306; infrastructure, 25, 33, 39, 40–42, 44, 59, 61, 80, 91, 134, 148, 179, 205, 261, 278, 306

392 / Index urban renewal, 10–11, 14, 27, 247, 250–51, 257, 259–60, 265, 267–70, 272, 277, 283–84, 300–301, 305, 306, 307, 314, 315, 358n98; failure, 234, 247, 253, 256, 274–75; federal role, 24–25, 28, 208, 258, 274, 277–78, 279, 282; opposition to, 281, 282, 287, 308; poverty, 27, 223, 239, 271; race issues, 202, 213, 215, 233, 239–45, 265, 276, 363n54; in San Francisco, 28, 183–84, 208–9, 212, 225, 246, 248, 250, 285; transportation issues, 181. See also Model Cities program U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, 306 U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 181, 354n15 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Housing Report (1961), 151 U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 237 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), 11, 253–55, 269– 70, 272, 284, 294, 371n5 U.S. Department of Justice, 154, 349n44 U.S. Department of Labor, 237 U.S. Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA), 245, 246, 247, 248 U.S. Housing Authority (USHA), 10, 134, 135, 137, 142, 147, 170, 227, 349n44 U.S. Navy Department, 154, 199, 349n44, 357n81 U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), 22, 234, 292 U.S. Steel Corporation, 79 U.S. Supreme Court, 215 U.S. War Department, 154, 349n44 utility municipalization, 15, 35, 43, 50, 52, 62, 73–74, 78

war workers, 139, 213 Washington, D.C., 39, 155, 202, 235, 253 Weaver, Robert, 272 Webb, U. S., 70–71, 99 Welch, Richard, 197 Wellington, Joseph, 270 West, Estelle, 177, 181, 194 West End and Mission Road Improvement Club, 43 Western Addition, 240, 241, 241, 248, 251, 253–54, 256, 264–65, 268, 270, 276, 278, 288, 305, 307 Western Addition Community Organization (WACO), 243 West Oakland, 299 West of Castro Improvement Club, 65 Westside Courts public housing project, 138 white-collar workers, 37, 125, 128, 233, 235–36 white ethnic clubs, 11, 12, 111–12 white flight, 215, 216, 228 whiteness, 11, 22, 23, 121, 134, 142–47, 329n11 white prosperity, 107, 127 Williams, Hannibal, 242 Wirt, Frederick, 109 women, 36, 38, 172, 236, 283, 371n11 Woollett, John, 99 working classes, 3, 56, 63, 125–26, 162, 233, 235, 241, 315, 333n16 working-class housing, 235 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 10, 124, 134–35, 142–47, 161–62, 166–70, 172, 194, 227, 342n6, 343n16, 346n44, 356n64 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 197 Wurster, William, 136, 138–39, 293

Valencia Gardens public housing project, 135–39, 141, 142, 147, 160, 215, 329n7, 345nn24–25 Valencia Street, 37, 38, 39, 40, 44, 60, 67, 140, 205, 207, 301 Van Ness Avenue, 37, 46, 54, 70, 71, 86, 205 Vatican II. See Second Vatican Council

Yat-Sen, Sun, 147, 346n50 Yerba Buena redevelopment area, 242, 244, 248, 275 Yorke, Peter, 219, 221 Yosemite National Park, 74 Young, Michael de, 50, 52–53, 332n86

Wagner, Robert, 154 Wagner Act, 142 War on Poverty, 22, 251, 267, 282, 284, 302

Zedong, Mao, 299 Zellerbach, James, 205 Zimdars, J. B., 100 zoning variances, 9, 76, 179, 184

H IS TORI C A L S T U D I ES OF U RBAN AME R I CA Edited by Lilia Fernández, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Becky M. Nicolaides, and Amanda I. Seligman James R. Grossman, Editor Emeritus

Series titles, continued from front matter Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities by Lawrence J. Vale Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago by Lilia Fernandez Building a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914 – 1960 by Richard Harris Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities by Carl H. Nightingale Sundays at Sinai: A Jewish Congregation in Chicago by Tobias Brinkmann In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820–1930 by Peter C. Baldwin Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse: Social Work and the Story of Poverty in America, Australia, and Britain by Mark Peel The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin by Christopher Klemek I’ve Got to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago by Cynthia M. Blair Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-Century New York City by Lorrin Thomas Staying Italian: Urban Change and Ethnic Life in Postwar Toronto and Philadelphia by Jordan Stanger-Ross New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era by Jennifer Fronc African American Urban History since World War II edited by Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing by D. Bradford Hunt

Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California by Charlotte Brooks The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia by Guian A. McKee Chicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis by Robert Lewis The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York by Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, in association with the American Antiquarian Society Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940 by Chad Heap Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America by David M. P. Freund Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955 by Adam Green The New Suburban History edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark by Timothy J. Gilfoyle City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871–1919 by Margaret Garb Chicagoland: City and Suburbs in the Railroad Age by Ann Durkin Keating The Elusive Ideal: Equal Educational Opportunity and the Federal Role in Boston’s Public Schools, 1950–1985 by Adam R. Nelson Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side by Amanda I. Seligman Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It by Alison Isenberg Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century by Andrew Wiese Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago, 1890–1919 by Robin F. Bachin In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 by Leslie M. Harris My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 by Becky M. Nicolaides Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto by Wendell Pritchett

The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900–1940 by Max Page Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877 by David O. Stowell Faces along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870–1920 by Madelon Powers Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 by Arnold R. Hirsch Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874 by Karen Sawislak Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era by Gail Radford Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North by John T. McGree